


The Moon & The President's Daughter

by xXdreameaterXx



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-05 10:07:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 32
Words: 53,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12187926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xXdreameaterXx/pseuds/xXdreameaterXx
Summary: There is a story that every child among the Shobogans hears before they can even talk. The story of their hero, their friend - the Doctor. It’s the story of the night he stole the moon and the President’s daughter.Breaking into the President’s garden started out as a bet, as one of those silly dares Missy usually had in mind for him. The Doctor never expected to get caught - by the President’s daughter.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even though this story is set in the normal Whoniverse, I'd like to treat this as an AU fic because of the obvious changes of putting the Twelfth Doctor and Missy on Gallifrey together and other minor changes.
> 
> I hope you'll enjoy this fic as much as the previous ones :)

_There is a story that every child among the Shobogans hears before they can even talk. The story of their hero, their friend - the Doctor. It’s the story of the night he stole the moon and the President’s daughter._

* * *

The night was warm, the air still sticky with the receding heat of Gallifrey's twin suns that were slowly disappearing behind the horizon, yet there was another light in the sky, one they had seen several nights in a row now and the Doctor looked up and watched it going around the capital in circles like it had done the night before and the one before that. He sighed audibly.

“It's too damn hot, isn't it?” Missy asked next to him.

He nodded in agreement. They had been walking in silence for a long while, not really paying much attention to where they had wandered off and the Doctor realized that somehow they had ended up in the part of the city usually reserved for the most wealthy and the most powerful and somehow he thought there was a certain irony to it. They were neither powerful nor wealthy and they had no intention to be. What they wanted to be, the Doctor couldn't quite say.

“She's beautiful, isn't she?” he asked his best friend and nodded towards the bright light above the Citadel. Somehow, whenever he looked at it, the Doctor felt a sense of longing or even envy.

“It's broken,” Missy scoffed dismissively. “It's just a damaged TARDIS that keeps escaping the shop. I'm saying they should burn it. There's really no point in trying to fix it if it just keeps flying off.”

The Doctor uttered a heavy sigh. “She wants to see the universe, I think,” he replied hesitantly and then turned his head to look at Missy. “Did you know the Shobogans call her Gallifrey's third moon?”

He yelped when a sudden smack hit him across the head. “If you believe that, you're just as deranged as the Shobogans. Gallifrey has no third moon.”

“Deranged?” The Doctor gawked at her. “You're the one that's deranged. You picked a drunken fight with six of them just last week!”

“A fight I won,” Missy pointed out.

“You were lucky they didn't kill you.”

When his friend failed to respond, the Doctor continued his stride along the red streets, for the first time realising just how sweet the air smelled around here. This part of town was filled with gardens full of flowers and fruit, yet they never saw any of them. Their owners had hidden them away behind high stone walls and iron gates to keep out the Shobogans that sometimes wandered into the capital, stealing what they could get their hands on. Not that the Doctor blamed them. No, quite the contrary. He had sympathy for them.

Once again his eyes fell on the light of the floating TARDIS above them and when he held his breath, the Doctor thought he could hear the sounds she made. It was a wheezing, groaning noise and somehow it tugged at his hearts. It was as if she was beckoning him to fly away and never come back.

“Remember that night?” he asked after a long moment of contemplation. Missy usually thought it was silly when he talked like this, but right now he just had to know. There was no other way to get these thoughts out of his head. “That night we stared into the Untempered Schism and stayed up all night, watching the stars?”

His friend hesitated.

“Well?”

“Yes,” Missy replied and her annoyance was showing in her voice. “Of course I remember. We said we would visit every single one of them.”

The Doctor kicked a stone with the tip of his shoe and it startled one of the stray cats, causing it to scale the nearest wall and disappear in the garden behind it.

“Do you still think about it?” he wanted to know. “About visiting the stars?”

“It was a childhood dream, Doctor,” Missy responded harshly. “A nice one, I give you that.”

“Yes, but doesn't it bother you that we have all these TARDISes and we never use them? Imagine all the places you could see,” he said enthusiastically and in his mind the Doctor was already elsewhere, on a planet far away or in the future, having a look at what Gallifrey would be like in 2000 years. “The possibilities are endless! Don't you hate being stuck here? Don't you ever wish you could have an adventure?”

To his surprise, Missy suddenly came to a halt and turned to look at the wall over which the cat had disappeared only a few moments ago. He stopped next to her to see what the matter was, but spotted nothing out of the ordinary. It was a palace like many others around here, enclosed by a massive brick wall.

“Do you know who lives here?” Missy asked him, nodding towards the extravagant building.

The Doctor shook his head. “Does it matter? Probably someone very rich, judging by the big house.”

His friend gave him a nudge. “It's the President's mansion,” she explained and there was a hint of curiosity in her voice.

“So?” he cocked an eyebrow at her, not really sure why she was suddenly so interested in where the President of Gallifrey lived.

The look that appeared on Missy's face was one the Doctor was all too familiar with, that mischievous grin he always noticed when she had one of her wicked ideas and he knew that whatever came next, he probably wouldn't like it. The Doctor wasn't someone to always follow the rules, quite the contrary, but Missy's idea of mischief often went too far for his liking. It was the same look he had seen before she had picked a fight with six Shobogans, all of them bigger and stronger than her. Their wits had been the only thing to save them.

“You said you wanted an adventure,” Missy said in a sing-song voice and nodded towards the wall. “I'm having a sudden craving for apples.”

The big apple tree in the President's garden hadn't slipped his notice and the Doctor turned his head, glowering at his friend. “You can't be serious.”

In response, Missy winked at him. “Bet you're too much of a coward to break into the President's garden and steal a fruit.”

“You're mad.”

“Oh, come on,” she prompted him gleefully, “the Council will still be in session.”

“The President will have servants,” the Doctor argued. The last thing he needed was to get caught breaking into the Lord President's estate. They were already keeping an eye on him because of their suspicion that he was occasionally breaking out of the Citadel to visit the Shobogans. Not that they were wrong.

Yet Missy shoved him further towards the wall. “They will have better things to do than to attend to the garden at this time of day. Come on. Do it!”

The Doctor growled at his friend and yet his gaze wandered towards the big apple tree behind the wall once more and for a brief moment, he wondered what would happen if he just did it. There was hardly anything that could go wrong, after all. The President was probably really still in the High Council chambers and the setting suns were making it harder to be spotted. His fingers tingled at the thought of climbing up that brick wall and stealing some of the Lord President's own fruits.

“Come on, coward,” she teased him once again, but something about the way Missy looked at him told the Doctor that she already knew he had given in.

“Shut up and give me a boost,” he replied gruffly.

 

The boost wasn't actually necessary, the Doctor just didn't want to do all the heavy lifting on his own as he started to climb up the wall. There were cracks between the stones big enough to find a foothold and his arms did the rest in pulling him up until he could catch a glimpse of the garden. Out of sheer surprise, the Doctor almost slipped when he spotted the paradise that lay behind the wall and he clung a little more tightly to the stones to get a proper look.

Somehow the property seemed so much bigger on the inside and he couldn't help but gasp at the red grass still glowing in the waning sunlight. There were trees and flowers and beautiful laid out paths leading up to a lake. What he saw behind that, the Doctor could only describe as a small forest.

“Get on with it!” Missy's hushed voice came from below. “I think I can hear guards approaching.”

With a sigh, the Doctor moved on and stretched his arm, but there was still a short distance between his hand and the first apple. He moved his foot, trying to find another crack in the wall, but in an attempt to reach for the fruit, his foot suddenly slipped as the stone beneath it gave way.

“Doctor!”

He tried to regain his balance, leaning forward, but he had greatly misjudged his own weight and a second later, the Doctor felt himself falling.

“Ow!” he growled as he landed in the grass with a loud thud. Before he sat up, the Doctor took a moment to assess his injuries, but found nothing apart from a few bruises and a battered ego. Slowly, he scrambled back to his feet and brushed the dust off his velvet jacket when suddenly he became aware of a figure standing close by. The Doctor raised his head.

In the middle of the President's garden, right in front of him, stood a young woman. She was dressed in the scarlet and orange colours of the Prydonian Chapter, wrapped in a long cloak that veiled her figure save for her face. The woman looked at him out of insanely big, dark eyes and for a moment he felt like he couldn't even move. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on on the entire planet.

The Doctor swallowed hard. “Please tell me you didn't see that.”

She opened her mouth and for a moment the Doctor feared she would call for help, raise an alarm, but whatever she had intended to say, her words were cut off by someone else.

“Clara?!”

The blood froze in his veins when he recognized the Lord President's voice and he threw the woman a pleading glance while he slowly backed off towards the wall.

The woman named Clara looked from the house back to him and any moment now she would call for the President or the guards and the Doctor would be arrested and spend the rest of this regeneration in a cell deep beneath the Citadel.

“Go,” Clara mouthed towards him before she spun around on her heels and rushed back to the house.

The Doctor watched her for a moment longer, hardly able to believe his luck, but when he finally came back to his senses, he plucked an apple from the tree, slid it into his pocket and climbed the wall. Just a minute later, he was back on the street, safe.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your first comments :) Glad you're enjoying this already even though we haven't even really started yet. Now, let's see how the story continues. . .

“Clara!”

She rushed towards the house, hurrying to meet her father at the door. Under any circumstances, Clara wanted to prevent him from glancing into the garden before the stranger had a chance to get away. Even now she wasn't quite sure why she had let him leave. The man had broken into her garden. She should have called for her father or the servants, but there had been something about his pleading look that had made Clara reconsider. She didn't even know who he was, but out of the corner of her eye, she had watched him steal an apple before attempting to climb back over the wall. Maybe the man had just been hungry.

“Father,” Clara said and greeted him with a smile before she pushed herself up on tiptoes and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “How was the council meeting?”

“Tedious,” he replied and laid his arm around her shoulder, walking her further into the house. Clara was always curious to hear what was going on in the Citadel and her father was her only source of information. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to live a normal life, to not be the President's daughter, to roam the streets of the capital freely, but the truth was that she had never set foot outside of these walls and she was desperate for any kind of news.

Clara squeezed her father's arm a little more tightly. “Well? What did the High Council talk about?”

When they reached the common room, her father threw her a dark look. “Do we really have to go over this? I'm tired and I have to prepare for my speech tomorrow.”

“I'll help you with your speech,” she suggested instantly. “I just want to know what's going on in the Citadel.”

With a sigh, her father sank down on one of the chair and looked at her for a long moment before he eventually spoke. “One of those reasons I don't want you to leave the grounds is that the outside world is a dark and dangerous place. I don't want to trouble you with what's going on out there.”

Clara lowered her gaze and pouted, knowing that her father would not be able to resist her sad face for long. And it worked, like it often did.

“It's the Shobogans,” her father explained. “The break-ins are becoming more frequent and I want to put an end to it. There is talk that some Time Lords have a habit of visiting their lairs.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Clara wanted to know.

Her father scoffed in response. “The Shobogans are savages!” he spat. “And above all, they are learning too much about us, about our weaknesses. They know exactly how to evade our guards, which routes to take through the city so they won't be spotted. We need a more permanent solution other than posting additional guards, but the High Council is as cowardly as ever to do something.”

She granted him a soft smile. “I'm sure you will think of something,” Clara told him kindly in an attempt to cheer him up. “They will see you only want what's best for Gallifrey, Father. Now, do you want help with your speech?”

Her father smiled at her in return. “No need, sweetheart,” he said. “You go and enjoy your evening.”

Another kiss on the cheek later, Clara made her way upstairs to her room and she closed the door behind her and hurried towards the window. Her chamber was one of the few places in the palace from which Clara could overlook the garden completely, but the wall was too high and the angle wrong, so she couldn't quite catch a glimpse of the street. Somehow she found herself wondering whether the intruder had made it out safely or whether he had fallen down in the attempt. She sniggered as she replayed the memory in her head, but then one obvious question came back to her mind: Who was he?

Maybe he was one of the Shobogans her father was constantly going on about and if that was the case, Clara should consider herself lucky. They were savages, murderers, rapists – whatever the latter meant. Clara had asked her father, but he had given her no answer. Then again, the man hadn't looked like a savage to her. Crazy, maybe, with the amount of silver curls on his head, but he hadn't dressed like someone from outside the capital walls. However, he hadn't dressed like a Time Lord either.

Clara stretched her neck, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't spot the stranger anywhere within or outside her garden walls. He was the first person apart from her father and their servants she had ever laid eyes on and she would never find out who he was.

* * *

The Doctor didn't know how long he had been staring at the bookshelf when he suddenly became aware of the presence of his mentor. In his surprise, he almost dropped the scrolls that he had promised to sort back into their original spot.

“It's late,” Stonix said with a hint of a smile. He was old even for a Time Lord, probably nearing 6000, and the Doctor found himself wondering whether his mentor had ever left Gallifrey. “Why don't you call it a day and leave the scrolls for tomorrow?”

“I wanted to help you with your experiment tonight,” the Doctor insisted.  
Stonix raised a curious eyebrow. “You mean like last time when you almost blew up the library because the vortex expanded?”

“I told you that was Missy,” he replied defensively. To this day he wasn't sure whether Stonix had believed that, but it was the truth. “She had tinkered with the settings!”

Yet despite his protest, Stonix took the scrolls out of the Doctor's hands and placed them aside before he started leading him out of the library's labyrinth. The Doctor inhaled the scent one last time before they stepped outside and the door closed behind them with a clicking sound.

“Can I ask you a question?” the Doctor said after a while as they walked along the corridors.

“Of course, boy,” his mentor replied and the Doctor cringed just a little. He was over 200 years old by now and certainly no longer a _boy_ even though he was aware that it would seem so to a 6000-year-old Time Lord.

“Have you ever left Gallifrey?”

Stonix pondered his answer for a long moment.

“I'm asking because I was talking to Missy earlier and I was thinking about all the TARDISes we have that we never really use anymore. They're rotting away in the shops.”

“First, they're not rotting,” his mentor replied softly and came to a halt. He raised his head and somehow the Doctor felt like his eyes stared right into his soul when he looked at him. “They're sleeping. Second, we're Time Lords, we're the guardians of time and our place is on Gallifrey where we observe and study the universe.”

“Wouldn't it be better to observe and study the universe from up close?”

Finally, his mentor cracked a smile. “I can understand why a youngling like you would like to go and out see it. I admit I was tempted to just take a TARDIS and have an adventure or two when I was your age, but my life, my true purpose is here. Doctor, I don't think the library the right place for you and once you find the right place, those restless hearts will calm down.”

The Doctor nodded softly, but somehow he doubted that Stonix could truly understand what he was feeling. After so many centuries in the library, how many memories did he still have of his early life?

“You and Missy are still close, I assume?” Stonix enquired curiously after they had resumed their walk.

The Doctor glanced at him and then decided to focus on his steps. “Yes, of course we are. She's my best friend, the regeneration didn't change that.”

“The regeneration didn't change her in the least,” his mentor confirmed. “I still don't think she's the best influence. I've heard rumours that you two have been sneaking outside the city's shield.”

“Didn't take you for one to listen to rumours.”

Stonix came to an abrupt halt and looked at him intently before he raised his finger as a warning. “Here's another rumour I've heard about the High Council. President Vankath is planning actions against the Shobogans. You don't wanna be caught in their company when that happens.”

Suddenly the Doctor's mind wandered back to the President's estate and the young Time Lady he had seen in the garden. She had protected him and the Doctor didn't even know who she was.

“I have another question,” he began. “Does the President have a wife?”

Stonix seemed a little taken aback by his question at first as the Doctor could clearly see by the hint of the frown that settled on his face.

“He did, but that was over a century ago,” his mentor replied. “I attended the ceremony when her mind was uploaded to the Matrix.”

“And a daughter?” the Doctor pressed.

Now he was eyed with a strange curiosity, but nevertheless, Stonix decided to give him an answer. “No. Not to my knowledge. And now it's time to rest, boy. Good night,” he said determinedly before he turned around on his heels and left the Doctor standing on the stairs in front of the library.

The Doctor sighed and looked up into the night sky and there it was again, the TARDIS, Gallifrey's third moon, circling the Citadel like a constant reminder of all of the time and space. Maybe one day the Doctor would see it all, but not tomorrow. Tomorrow he would help Stonix with his experiment, whether he wanted his help or not.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your comments, sweeties :) I'm happy that you're enjoying it so far!!!

Time Lords didn't really need sleep, but nevertheless, they had taken up the habit of resting for a brief period during the night just to clear their heads of any baggage that might have accumulated in their minds over the course of the day, but tonight the Doctor found it almost impossible to find any peace at all. His head was buzzing with everything that had happened today and when the twin suns rose above the horizon, he jumped up from his mattress and was already on his way to find Missy when he realized he wasn't sure whether he actually wanted to talk to her about it.

She didn't understand his need to run away as much as she had before the latest regeneration and the Doctor hadn't even mentioned the Time Lady named Clara to her with a single syllable. Maybe she would know who Clara was, maybe she wouldn't, the Doctor wasn't sure whether he wanted to risk confiding her in. If the President's wife had died and Stonix didn't know of any daughter, then who was she? The Doctor vowed to find out.

After slipping on his favourite red velvet coat, the Doctor wandered through the streets of the capital, hoping to find his way back to the President's mansion and when he had finally arrived, the Doctor ducked behind a bush and bided his time. At some point, the President would have to leave his house to attend the High Council meeting and the Doctor would be here when he did.

* * *

Clara opened her eyes when the suns shone through the curtains, but somehow her night had been restless and filled with thoughts of the tall stranger that had broken into her garden. The idea of never finding out who he really was frustrated her a great deal and suddenly she wished she could just walk outside and look for him, find out whether he was a Time Lord at all.

 _You're safe inside these walls_ , her father's voice resounded in her head. _There is nothing out there for you, nothing but danger and despair. I want to shield you from it._

Clara had argued on multiple occasions that she was no longer a Time Tot and now, at 168, she considered herself a grown Time Lady despite still being in her first regeneration. Yet on the few occasions she had tried to leave, the servants, instructed by her father, had kept her from it. By now, Clara had given up and accepted that she would only leave the house and the garden when her father thought it was safe for her to do so and in the meantime he would try his best to make Gallifrey a better place just for her. The day she was allowed to leave, Clara would find a perfect planet in front of her doorstep.

She stretched in bed and uttered a small sound of content before she sat up, ready to begin her day with a nice breakfast before going outside to read. A few decades ago, when she had once again begged her father to be allowed to leave the house, he had turned her down, but the next day she had woken up to a surprise. He had used Time Lord technology to make some improvements to the garden, transforming it into a paradise just for her. Clara now had her own forest, her own lake and many paths through the flowers and plants that almost formed a kind of labyrinth. She was the only person to really know her way through the green maze. Now, spending her time outside in the garden was her favourite pastime.

Clara walked over to the window and looked out to see how the early morning suns illuminated her sanctuary, tinging it in a bright orange hue. She sighed at the beautiful sight of it until something unusual caught her eye and Clara's face turned into a frown.  
Next to the apple tree, a head popped up above the wall and she clearly recognized the unruly silver curls that she knew could only belong to the intruder from last night. He was back and looking into her garden again.

This was it. This was her chance. Clara tightened her robe around her body and rushed downstairs, past her maid and past the cook, muttering apologies and instructions not to follow her, but when she arrived at the tree, Clara slowed down her steps. That man could be dangerous for all she knew, maybe it would be better to call for her maid again. She was just about to turn around and head back inside when his face appeared above the wall once again and their eyes locked for a brief moment. Then he ducked. Clara could still see his hands that were clinging to the stones.

“I can see you!” she called out to him and Clara realized that her voice was shaking a little. Somehow she was a little more scared than she had anticipated. “And you better not try anything funny or. . . or I'll call for help!”

Reluctantly, the man raised his head again and looked at her with a mixture of curiosity and fright. Clara thought that he didn't really seem dangerous at all at this moment and she still had the upper hand. The guards would be with her in a matter of seconds if she screamed.

“I, uhm,” the man spluttered, “you have a nice garden.”

“Thank you,” Clara replied, but she crossed her arms in front of her chest, looking intently at him. “You seem to like the apples.”

“Uhm,” he paused and then granted her an apologetic smile. “The one I nicked was for a friend actually.”

Not dangerous, Clara determined, but he was still a stranger and he had broken into someone else's property, so she decided to be wary for now until she had found out a little more about him.

“Are you one of them?” she enquired carefully.

The man furrowed his brows. “One of who?”

“You know, the savages.”

Suddenly a hint of recognition passed over his face. “Oh, you mean the Shobogans,” he said and Clara watched him reach out over the wall to find a better hold. “No, I'm a Time Lord. My name is the Doctor.”

“You don't dress like a Time Lord,” she noted, nodding towards the bits of him that she could see. He wore red velvet which could indicate he belonged to the Prydonian Chapter, but not the customary robes.

The Doctor smiled and gave a shrug. “What can I say,” he chuckled. “I'm a bit of a rebel.”

His response made Clara laugh. “Clearly,” she replied. “Time Lords aren't normally thieves.”

“I wasn't stealing!”

Clara frowned and gestured towards the apple tree.

“That was just, uhm, a transfer of property,” he argued and suddenly the Doctor seemed to lose his grip on the stones and slipped, but caught his balance at the last moment. “I'm sorry, do you mind if I climb over? My arms are getting a bit tired here.”

His suggestion caught her a little off guard and for a moment Clara wasn't sure what to reply to him. Right now, with the wall between them, she could still feel safe, but what if he entered her garden again? What if they were face to face?

“I promise I won't harm you,” the Doctor said softly.

She hesitated for a moment, but eventually nodded. The Doctor pulled himself up, lifted his own weight over the wall and then landed on the grass with a thud, this time on feet and not his bum.

“What are you doing here?” Finally Clara asked the most obvious question that had only come to her mind now.

The Doctor looked around for a while, admiring her garden before his eyes shifted back to her. Only now he seemed to realize she had asked him a question.

“I guess I just wanted to thank you,” he said. “You caught me stealing. You could have called for the guards or the Lord President. But you didn't.”

Clara cocked an eyebrow at him. “I thought it was just a transfer of property?”

Now it was the Doctor's turn to laugh. “Yeah, right.”

For a moment, she laughed with him, but her features soon softened again and her tone became a little more serious. “My father would have thrown you into the dungeons deep below the Citadel,” she explained. “Seems like a harsh punishment for stealing an apple. I thought you might have just been hungry.”

The Doctor nodded. “Thank you,” he said sincerely, but then his face took on a more curious expression. “You're the Lord President's daughter?”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “My name is Clara.”

She didn't really know why, but somehow the Doctor seemed surprised as if he hadn't expected that answer. It struck her as a little strange, but she didn't have a chance to ask about it when the Doctor gestured back towards the wall.

“I should go,” he said. “I don't really wanna be caught breaking into the President's garden. Again.”

A hint of a laugh escaped his lips and Clara had half a mind to ask him to stay. It had been decades since she had last met someone new and the faces around her were beginning to bore her a little. It was always her father and the same servants, but never a stranger, never someone actually interesting.

Yet reason got the better of her and Clara nodded eventually. The servants had seen her step outside into the garden. If they decided to follow her, they would find the Doctor and then they would both be in trouble.

“You can take an apple if you like,” Clara said, gesturing towards the tree. “Father says they're the most delicious apples on Gallifrey, but I wouldn't know.”

In response, the Doctor plucked a fruit from the tree and admired it for a moment before he polished it with his holey jumper. Then he took a large bite.

“Mh,” he hummed and nodded approvingly. “Not bad.”

Clara watched as he climbed the wall and soon vanished behind it and a part of her immediately regretted not asking him to stay. The Doctor wasn't dangerous. He wasn't a thief and he wouldn't harm her. When she heard another thud on the other side of the wall, followed by his footsteps hurrying away, Clara realized that he had been the only exciting thing to happen to her in over a century and she had let him slip away.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your comments, guys :) The Doctor is curious about Clara, Clara is curious about the Doctor. But will they see each other again?

The Doctor was fully aware that some things just didn't add up. If Clara really was the President's daughter, then why had no one ever heard of her, not even his mentor Stonix who knew almost everything? Why had no one ever seen her? Something strange was going on and somehow the Doctor wanted to find out even though it was risky to dig into the Lord President's private matters or even break into his garden again. Was it worth it?

Someone cleared their throat and the Doctor looked up to see Stonix blocking the entrance to the library, arms crossed in front of his chest and an angry look on his face.

“Uhm,” the Doctor hesitated, “good morning?”

“It's noon,” his mentor replied coldly. “And I vaguely remember someone wanting to help me with my experiment this morning.”

“Oh,” he uttered in response as he suddenly remembered his promise. The Doctor swallowed and granted Stonix an apologetic look. He had been so caught up in his thoughts about the strange Time Lady that he had completely forgotten about the experiment. He couldn't really blame his mentor for being mad. “I'm sorry. But I'm here now, I can-”

“It's okay, I've already finished it,” Stonix replied and his voice had softened by now. The Doctor could tell that he wasn't really mad, especially since his mentor hadn't wanted his help in the first place.

“Did it work?” he enquired. “Did the dimensional shift bomb work?”

From the pleased look on his mentor's face, the Doctor could tell that it had and all of a sudden he felt excited. He had always been eager to help Stonix with his experiments, but this clever device could really come in handy.

“It did,” Stonix confirmed and he placed an arm on the Doctor's shoulder before he started to lead him towards his laboratory within the library. “However, there is still an issue with the invisibility setting. I can send the particles to another plane without a problem, but the hole is still visible. I'm considering leaving it like that.”

“Why?” the Doctor wanted to know.

His mentor scoffed. “Well, imagine you blow a hole into the floor and make it invisible. People could fall right into it.”

The Doctor had to admit that it made sense, but somehow the problem stoked his ambition and he wanted to be the one to solve it. He was sure that with a bit of tinkering he could.

“I'll have a look at it,” he said as they entered the laboratory and the Doctor instantly made his way across the room to where he already noticed the dimensional shift bomb lying on the desk, but his mentor stopped him.

“There's no need,” he said calmly.

“But-”

Stonix cut him off with a smile and the Doctor realized that there was no use trying to convince him. His mentor wouldn't give in. So instead, the Doctor picked up a handful of scrolls to sort them back into the library shelves, but as he walked through the labyrinth of books and scrolls, his mind wandered back to Clara.

There was something about her and the Doctor couldn't really say what it was. Maybe it was the secrecy around her existence. Maybe the Doctor simply liked her. But he knew that there was a risk in going back to see her, the risk that he would get caught by one of the guards or even the President himself and Clara was right. If that happened, he would find himself in a dungeon deep below the citadel. And yet, the way Clara had looked at him. . .

Suddenly the Doctor felt a stab in the back and even though it was only a soft prod, his hearts stopped for a moment and he jumped on the spot, dropping the scrolls while he spun around to see what had touched him.

Missy was howling with laughter. “Man, you should've seen your face.”

“For Rassilon's sake!” the Doctor blurted out, his hearts still hammering in his chest from the shock. “Missy!”

Still, his friend sniggered, obviously pleased that she had managed to give him a thorough scare. “I didn't mean to make you regenerate because of a heart attack,” she said after a moment. “I just wanted to ask whether you wanted to. . . _go out_ tonight.”

Go out. That was their secret code for sneaking out of the capital to visit the Shobogans and on any other night, the Doctor would have agreed, but for some reason he found a lie escaping his mouth before he could think better of it.

“I'm sorry, I promised Stonix I would help him improve the dimensional shift bomb,” he said and glanced around nervously, hoping that his mentor hadn't overheard them. 

Missy seemed to buy it instantly and she shrugged in response. “Alright, maybe tomorrow?”

The Doctor nodded and then went to pick the scrolls off the floor. Why was he lying to his best friend for no good reason? Why was he even trying to get out of a nice, exciting evening with Missy and the Shobogans? The Doctor couldn't quite say, but he somehow felt like he wanted to keep his options for tonight open until he had made up his mind.

* * *

Empty. For some reason, Clara felt empty and useless as she lay on her bed, twiddling her thumbs just to have something to do. The strange Doctor just wouldn't leave her head and suddenly it annoyed her that he could go wherever he liked, that he could break into someone else's property without getting punished and she couldn't even go as far as the street in front of her house. Maybe she should have called for the guards or her father just to put an end to him wandering into her garden, but Clara knew that that was only the spite talking in her head. The truth was that somehow she admired him for it, she admired his courage to come back even after he had been caught and maybe Clara wished that she could be just a little bit more like him.

And why shouldn't she? She was grown Time Lady and still her father was treating her like a child. In the spur of the moment, prompted by the Doctor's insolence, Clara jumped up from her bed and grabbed her robe. No one was going to prevent her from leaving the house this time. She would go outside and find the Doctor.

On her way downstairs, however, Clara promptly ran into her maid.

“Oh, Miss Clara,” the woman said in surprise and smiled at her. “I thought you were going to rest? Is the headache better?”

“I was resting,” she replied a little breathlessly. She needed an excuse and she needed it now. “I was gonna go into the garden now. Get some fresh air.”

Her maid smiled at her. “That sounds like an excellent idea, it'll help with the headache. Do you want me to change the sheets in the meantime?”

Clara smiled nervously and nodded. Perfect excuse. Her maid hadn't noticed a thing. However, when she reached the hall, she soon noticed the next obstacle and somehow Clara knew that she would need a better lie to get the guards to abandon their posts. Quickly, she racked her brain for a good excuse until the perfect one finally came to mind.

“Guards!” Clara called out and the two men stationed by the front door spun around and looked at her in an instant.

“Miss Clara,” one of them replied, “is something wrong?”

“I think there's someone in the garden,” she said and tried to sound as frightened as she could. She pretended to gasp for air. “I was about to go for a walk through the forest when I heard footsteps! I wasn't sure whether they came from within the garden or from the streets. Could you please have a look?”

The guards exchanged a quick glance before they hurried off in the direction of the garden and Clara had to refrain from laughing out loud. If she had known that it was so easy to distract them, she would have escaped from the house decades ago. She almost couldn't believe her luck.

With a gleeful giggle, Clara reached for the door handle and there was a tingling sensation running through her entire body when she felt her palm closed around the cold metal. Just one more step and she was free. One step and she would finally see Gallifrey with her own eyes and not just through the pictures in the books. At last, she opened the door to freedom.

“Where do you think you're going?”

Her hearts sank into her boots when she heard the cold voice of the guard stationed outside her father's mansion and Clara realized that she should have known. It had been too easy. She had underestimated the lengths her father would go to to protect her. A bout of nausea came over her when Clara understood she would never leave this house and she would never see the strange Doctor ever again. She was all alone.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your kind, lovely comments. So happy that you're enjoying the story and the atmosphere and, well, when it comes to Clara's father, I guess you'll learn soon enough what that is all about ;)

The Doctor had just reached the top of the wall when suddenly a couple of guards had stormed the garden, obviously looking for something or someone. He ducked, hoping they wouldn't be able to see his hands that were desperately clinging to the stones, and bided his time. The more time passed, the more his arms started to ache and he realized that he was getting a little too old for this sort of game. If this was to become a more frequent hobby, the Doctor would have to find another way inside. Then, at last, the guards' steps were retreating and the Doctor swung himself back up and sat down on top of the wall.

“Too old for this,” he muttered to himself, panting as he did, but then something else caught his attention.

Clara's small figured appeared in the garden and she came running towards him, but the closer she came the more the Doctor realized that she hadn't spotted him at all. She was completely unaware of his presence. And she was crying.

Something tugged at his hearts when she was close enough for him to see her tears and for a moment, the Doctor wasn't actually sure what to do. He had never been good at comforting people, but he was hit by the sudden urge to make her feel better.

“Clara?”

The woman spun around and after a brief second of surprise her features lit up. She wiped the tears from her eyes as she looked at him. “Doctor,” she blurted out, sounding more than a little astonished. “What. . . you came back!”

When she smiled at him, the Doctor felt reassured that she wouldn't call for the guards and jumped down the wall, into her garden. He crossed the distance between them and had half a mind to close his arms around her in an attempt to comfort her, but then thought better of it and stopped in front of Clara.

“Are you alright?” the Doctor wanted to know.

In response, Clara sniffed and wiped the last tear from her face before she eventually nodded. “I am now,” she replied. “Do you wanna go for a walk?”

She nodded in the direction of the forest and the Doctor glanced around once more, noticing that it was probably wise to not linger out in the open lest someone saw them.  
Clara led the way into the forest and the Doctor soon realized that on his own he would probably get lost in a matter of minutes. Even this part of the garden seemed bigger on the inside than it was on the outside and no matter what he might think of the Lord President, the Doctor couldn't help but admit that the man had a talent for the Time Lord art of playing with dimensions. Then suddenly the Doctor remembered something that he had brought, something that might help lift Clara's spirits.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said and reached deep into his pocket before he pulled out an apple and handed it over to Clara. She looked at him in confusion. “The President is wrong. _These_ are the best apples.”

Reluctantly, Clara reached for the fruit and smelled it. She took a very careful bite and the Doctor watched her expression as she tasted it.

“Mhh,” she hummed, “this is really good. Where do they grow?”

“Oh, uhm.” The Doctor quickly averted his eyes. “Just outside the Citadel.”

“ _What?!_ ”

Clara's eyes were wide with shock or amazement when she looked at him and the Doctor suddenly felt a tiny stab of pride. Venturing out of the capital without permission was a crime, but somehow the President's Daughter seemed a little impressed.

“You went outside the protective shield just to get me an apple?!”

The Doctor granted her a smug smile. “It's not as dangerous as it sounds.”

“Still,” she replied but then trailed off as she regarded the apple in her hand. Somehow her mood had already shifted again and she seemed thoughtful rather than impressed. “I can't go anywhere. I'm a prisoner here.”

The Doctor let his gaze wander through the woods and for a moment he just took in the impression. The leaves on the trees shone golden rather than red in the late afternoon sunlight, some birds were chirping over their heads and the ground beneath their feet was orange moss so soft that it felt like walking on a carpet.

“There are worse prisons,” he reasoned and then turned to look at her curiously. “Why can't you leave?”

Clara took another bite from the apple, but the topic seemed to have ruined her appetite. “My father says that the capital is too dangerous, that the Shobogans keep breaking in and that the only safe place for me is in here.”

The Doctor shrugged. “I can get in without breaking a sweat,” he said, scoffing. “But I wouldn't necessarily tell your father that.”

She smiled at him for a brief moment but said nothing in response. So that was the reason no one had ever seen her, the reason no one knew of her existence. The President Vankath was keeping his daughter a secret from the world so no one would know that he kept her as a prisoner in her own home. All of a sudden the Doctor felt incredibly sorry for her.

“Well, you're not exactly missing much. The capital is a dull, boring place full of dull, boring people,” he said and then looked at her again. “Doesn't it get lonely?”

Clara uttered a long, heavy sigh. “All the time,” she admitted.

It was a bad idea, no, an insane one, but the words escaped his mouth before he could stop them. Why was he like that? Why did he always act before he could think?

“Well, I guess I'll just have to visit you more often then.”

Clara's head shot around in an instant and she gawked at him with large, brown eyes. The Doctor thought they were so big that the golden leaves were reflecting in them.

“You would do that?” she asked in disbelief. “You'd risk that for _me_?”

The Doctor shrugged, but no answer came to his mind. She seemed worth the risk, Clara the Time Lady with her sadness and her amazingly big eyes. In response, Clara only stared at him as if she was still unable to believe he was willing to come back for her.

“We'll have to find an easier way for me to get into the garden though,” the Doctor reasoned. “I mean, climbing the wall, that just screams _up to something_ in case someone sees me.”

“There is no other way in,” Clara told him immediately. “You can't come in through the front door. It's guarded by four people and they have weapons!”

“I might know a way,” he replied and turned around. The Doctor could still see the garden wall from where they stood and he instantly noticed the perfect spot. “See that bush over there by the wall?”

“Yes?”

The Doctor grinned at her. “Meet me there tomorrow night. Just wait for me there. Can you do that?”

A large smile spread across her face as she nodded and the Doctor thought that she looked beautiful when she was happy. He was going to help her. A young woman like Clara shouldn't waste her life in a cage, all on her own.

“I'll be back for you tomorrow night,” he promised with a smile. “Trust me, I will.”

She nodded, still beaming broadly at him, and the Doctor was now surer than ever. Clara was most definitely worth the risk.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your comments!!!

Her father had retreated to his office and Clara knew from experience that when he was working, she probably wouldn't see him again all night until it was time for him to leave for the next High Council meeting in the morning, so she put on her robe and headed outside into the garden. The Doctor had instructed her to wait by the bush next to the wall and she found it again without an effort where everyone else in the household probably would have taken hours or even days in the maze of the garden. He hadn't specified a time and Clara knew that she was probably early, but the last thing she wanted was to miss him. So she sat down on a large stone close to the wall and waited for her Doctor.

* * *

The Doctor was sorting the scrolls back into shelves as slowly as possible, always glancing towards Stonix, but his mentor didn't seem to have the slightest intention to call it a day anytime soon. That was highly inconvenient, given what the Doctor planned to do.

“It's getting late,” Stonix said after a while and the Doctor's hearts skipped a little beat. Was his plan going to work out after all? He checked the large clock above his mentor's desk and it was already early evening. Clara would be waiting for him.

“Yes,” the Doctor agreed and stuffed a book back between two other large volumes about the history of the High Council.

“Don't you want to go home at some point?” Stonix wanted to know. “Or go out and have fun with your friend?”

 _That's what I'm trying to do_ , the Doctor thought, but thought better of saying it out loud. What he was about to do was illegal and generally not a very nice move. The Doctor didn't want to steal from his mentor even though he had every intention to give the device back afterwards.

“I, uhm,” the Doctor paused and racked his brain for a good excuse, “I actually wanted to read up on some things. If you don't mind, of course.”

Stonix sighed and placed his papers aside, looking intently at the Doctor for a moment as if he was trying to figure out whether what he had said was the truth. The silence between them seemed to last forever until he finally spoke.

“You're young, Doctor,” his mentor said. “You shouldn't waste your youth in the library. There's still enough time for that later. You should go out and cause a bit of trouble.”

“Believe me, I'm causing enough trouble as it is.”

His mentor's look darkened. “I don't mean you should sneak out of the capital and visit your Shobogan friends. They're why we're not allowed to leave the city without permission and the President will have a good reason for penalising it. They pose a threat to the Time Lords.”

The Doctor groaned. He felt like he had had this particular conversation a million times before, even with Missy before she had agreed to join him outside the Citadel. Now she knew the truth and she knew the Time Lords were more of a danger to the Shobogans than the other way around.

“They're not a threat,” he argued angrily. “And they're not savages like everyone says. They're people, people who are starving while we live in excess!”

“Exactly!” his mentor growled. “They're hungry and hunger makes people do terrible things.”

“They wouldn't have to be hungry if the Citadel opened its shield and agreed to give them food and work and-”

“Enough!”

His mentor's sharp voice cut through the silence in the library and the Doctor stopped in an instant, but when he looked at Stonix, he realized that his features had already softened.

“Doctor, you and I not in the position to make decisions about the Shobogans or what to do with them. I know they're not bad people, but they are different and I'm not sure whether they would fit into our society. The Lord President was elected for good reasons because he is a smart man and I trust him to find a solution. If you become President, you may do whatever you think is right, but until then you should trust in the man we elected.”

“That's probably what people said about Rassilon,” the Doctor snapped and Stonix instantly gawked at him at the mention of the former Lord President's name.

Then his Stonix rose from his seat and set out to pack up his scrolls. “I'm going to call it a night,” he said after a while. “And you should do the same thing.”

“I will,” he growled in response.

 

Once Stonix had left the library and the Doctor had made sure he was really alone, he started to approach the desk and reached for the dimensional shift bomb. With this device, it would be so easy. He could walk into the President's garden to see Clara whenever he pleased and no one would catch him scale the wall.

“What are you up to?”

The Doctor spun around, hiding the bomb behind his back when he looked at Missy. For a Time Lady, her timing was incredibly bad.

“Missy,” he spluttered, “what. . . uhm. . . what are you doing here?”

His best friend smiled at him in response. “Well, you blew me off last night, so I thought I'd try again. Wanna go and have a drink with our savage friends?”

The Doctor glowered at her.

“What? I can't call them that even when they can't hear it?”

“They're not savages,” he argued.

“Well, they are to the Time Lords,” Missy said with a shrug. “And their behaviour is quite un-Time-Lord-ish sometimes. Have you ever seen the disgusting thing they do in pairs when-”

“I'm sorry,” the Doctor cut her off before she had a chance to elaborate. “I promised Stonix I could help him improve this.”

He lifted the dimensional shift bomb so Missy could catch a glimpse, but then swiftly hid it inside his pocket before she had a chance to figure out what exactly it was and what it did. The Doctor didn't want her to ask any more questions. If she found out about Clara, all hell would break loose.

“What is it?” his friend demanded to know.

“It's a device,” he said. “And it's not working as it should. How about we visit the Shobogans tomorrow?”

Missy shrugged and turned around, heading towards the exit. “Fine.”

Once she was gone, the Doctor breathed a sigh of relief, but the feeling soon vanished when he glanced at the clock. He was late for his meeting with Clara.

* * *

The suns had already set a while ago and a chill ran through her body, prompting Clara to close her robe a little tighter around her body. It was late and the Doctor still wasn't here and a voice in the back of her mind told Clara that he wasn't going to come after all. And why would he? If he was caught, he would be thrown into the dungeons beneath the Citadel and rot for at least a regeneration. Why would he come here when the risk was so great, when he was sure to get caught at some point? Clara was only a girl, she wasn't worth the risk and even though she knew that it wasn't her fault, it somehow made her sad. Just for a moment, for the first time in her life, she had had a friend and she had lost him. 

With a sigh, she rose from the stone and started to make her way back to the house, but her steps felt as heavy as her hearts when she thought about her strange Doctor and how much he had brightened up her day by just being here. Then, all of a sudden, Clara heard a noise. It was a strange one, a whirring sound, low but yet audible and it made her turn around.

She gasped.

“Sorry I couldn't get here earlier,” the Doctor said with an apologetic smile, but Clara didn't pay him any attention at all. Her eyes were fixed on the huge, gaping hole in the wall.

She gawked and raised her hand, pointing at the hole, but the Doctor only looked at her in confusion.

“You put a hole in my wall!” she exclaimed. “A gigantic, huge, visible hole!”

“Oh, right.” The Doctor's smile vanished as he drew a device out of his pocket, followed by another device that made a different whirring sound and emitted a green glow.

“Doctor, you can't put a hole in my wall!” Clara went on and suddenly she wasn't sure whether it had been a good idea to tell the Doctor to come back. He would be in so much trouble. She would be in trouble. “If my father sees it-”

“Working on it,” he mumbled while he held the two devices together, though what that was supposed to accomplish, Clara couldn't quite say. The hole was still there and while she looked, a red, furry creature jumped through it into her garden.

For a moment, Clara was startled, but only until she remembered a few pictures she had seen in her books. The furry animal wasn't a danger. It was just a cat. While the Doctor was still busy tinkering with the devices, Clara bent down and was surprised when the animal approached her in an instant. Carefully, she reached out and giggled when the cat nuzzled its head against her palm.

“Uh,” she uttered, chuckling. “You're so soft. I've never seen a cat from up close. Father would never let me have one although I've heard that some keep them as pets.”

The Doctor didn't respond, but right now Clara didn't even mind so much. She was focused on the purring animal that seemed as happy to see her as she was.

“There,” the Doctor said eventually and Clara looked up just in time to see the hole in the wall close back up. “I fixed the invisibility setting, like I said I would.”

Clara picked the cat up in her arms and joined the Doctor by the wall. He was right, it was solid again, but now he wouldn't be able to get back out.

“So you're just gonna blow a hole in the wall every time you want to come here?” she enquired.

The Doctor turned his head and grinned. “There's no need,” he said. “The hole is still there, just. . . invisible.”

Clara raised her eyebrows at him, but the Doctor had already stepped forward to demonstrate it to her. He outstretched his hand and Clara gasped when it went right through the stones.

“How?” she asked in amazement.

The Doctor drew his arm back and smiled at her. “Dimensional shift bomb,” he explained and lifted the device up for a moment. “Sends the particles to another plane, but my mentor built in a little setting that would make it seem as if the particles were still there. No one will know there's a hole there, but we should probably try to remember where exactly we put it.”

Clara looked at the wall again and tried to spot a difference, but she couldn't see one. It looked exactly like it had before.

“So we can just. . . walk through? As if there was nothing there?”

“There _is_ nothing there,” he corrected her. “It's just an illusion.”

A smile spread across her face when Clara realized what possibilities had just been opened up to her and she wasn't even done fathoming what it meant when the Doctor held out his hand to her. She looked at him in confusion.

“So?” he asked.

“So what?”

The Doctor grinned at her. “Do you want to see it? Gallifrey? The dull, boring planet with its dull, boring people?”

For a moment it felt like Clara couldn't breathe. For 168 years she had been a prisoner in her own home until the day this crazy stranger had stumbled into her garden and all of a sudden, her entire life had been turned upside down. It was too good to be true, just like it had been yesterday morning when she had tried to leave through the front door. It was too easy. What if something went wrong? What if they got caught?

As if the animal had felt the shift in her mood, it jumped out of her arms and darted through the wall and back onto the street behind it. To her, to the Doctor, to anyone walking past, this wall was just a wall. But it wasn't just that any longer. Now, it was a door to freedom and Clara reached for the Doctor's hand, holding on tight while she held her breath and they stepped out into the street together.


	7. Chapter 7

Even though he hadn't thought it to be possible, the Doctor noticed Clara's eyes grow even bigger as they stepped out into the street. There wasn't really anything there, he had chosen a dead-end street where he could quietly walk through a wall without anyone noticing, but for Clara, someone who had never seen anything outside her own garden, it must have seemed magnificent.

“We're in the city,” she gasped and a large smile spread across her face. She turned around, trying to take in as much as she could. “We're actually in the city.”

The Doctor cleared his throat. “Well, technically you've been inside the city this whole time.”

He was startled when Clara suddenly reached for his arm and giggled excitedly. “Oh, shut up. You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” he replied and somehow he couldn't help but feel a stab of pride. There was something about Clara, something about showing her around the Citadel that excited him. He hadn't felt like this in a very long time. “So, what do you wanna do?”

“What do you mean?”

The Doctor frowned at her for a brief moment. Hadn't he made his intentions clear to her? “Well, what part of the Citadel do you want to see first? I mean, sure, we can just walk around. Or we could do something amazing?”

“You wanna go out there?” Clara asked and suddenly the Doctor thought there was a hint of fear in her voice that he knew he should have seen coming. Clara had been a prisoner all her life, so the thought of just walking through the city must be equally exciting and terrifying for her.

“I don't know what your father told you about the Citadel, but it's not a dangerous place. It's just a city full of people minding their own business, living their lives, working, eating, drinking. Nothing's gonna happen to you,” the Doctor promised her. “Especially not while you're with me.”

“But what if someone sees me? What if they recognize me? I'm the President's daughter!”

He hesitated, considering what exactly he should tell her, but he paused for a moment too long and Clara let go of his arm, throwing him an inquisitive look.

“That look again,” she said. Clara's eyes were boring into him. “You gave me that look when I first told you who I was. Why?”

The Doctor sucked his breath in between his teeth, but still, the right words wouldn't come to mind. How was he supposed to tell her when he didn't even understand it himself?

“Tell me!” Clara demanded and the sudden sharpness in her voice caught him by surprise. “If you ask me to leave my home with you, you have to tell me.”

“No one knows that you exist,” he replied calmly and now it was Clara's turn to be surprised. She gawked at him but said nothing. “I didn't know who you were when I first broke into your garden. I asked my mentor if he knew whether the President had a wife or daughter, but even he didn't know you exist and he knows everything.”

“Why would my father keep me a secret?” Clara wanted to know.

“Why would he keep you locked up in your own home? I don't know, Clara,” the Doctor replied instantly. “But look at the bright side: no one will recognize you. Come with me, please.”

The Doctor held out his hand again and Clara hesitated, granting him an insecure look while she bit down on her lip.

“I promise you that nothing will happen and no one will ever know,” he said softly.

Finally, Clara inhaled deeply and took his hand.

 

The Doctor led her through the quiet streets of the quarter and it didn't slip his notice that she looked around in amazement. It was a strange thing. For decades the only thing the Doctor had wanted was to leave this planet, to just take a TARDIS and run away, but now, with Clara by his side, he noticed for the first time in ages how beautiful his home planet really was. It was as if he discovered it anew through Clara's eyes. At some point, he would take her outside the city walls and show her the fields of red grass. The Doctor was sure that Clara would love them, but she wasn't ready for that yet.

“What is that?” Clara suddenly asked and pointed skywards.

The Doctor raised his head and noticed the TARDIS circling the sky above the Citadel. His hearts felt heavy again, heavy with the yearning for foreign planets and different times. In the end, nothing would be able to keep him here forever, not even Clara.

He chuckled. “Some people say it's Gallifrey's third moon,” he said.

Clara cocked her head and frowned at him. “But Gallifrey has no third moon. What's it really?”

“It's a TARDIS,” the Doctor explained. “She keeps breaking out of the repair shop. I think she wants to see the universe.”

A smile appeared on Clara's face as she looked up. “I think I can hear her.”

“So can I,” he replied.

They had walked past a few people already and Clara had observed them with interest, but as they turned around the next corner, her mouth suddenly fell open at the sight in front of them.

“What is that?” she asked in astonishment, pointing at the crowd in front of their eyes.

The Doctor grinned proudly. “That is the Citadel's market. You can buy anything you like here. Food, drinks, clothes, appliances and-,” he paused, frowning. “Whatever it is that guy over there is selling.”

“All these people,” Clara uttered breathlessly. “I've never seen so many people.”

“Do you want to eat something?” the Doctor asked her. “They sell Murdis over there.”

Clara raised her eyebrows at him. “What's that?”

“They're biscuits, but with wild herbs mixed into the dough,” he explained. “They're best when they're still warm and the core is just a bit raw.”

“That sounds weird,” she remarked, but the Doctor didn't listen to her any longer. If she had never tried Murdis before, she would have to try them now, so he walked up to the little booth and demanded a bag full.

With a proud smile, he held the bag out to Clara while the delicious smell of the biscuits already filled his nose. She hesitated for a moment, but then reached into the bag and stuffed one of them into her mouth.

“Rassilon's ghost!” she blurted out. “They're amazing!”

The Doctor chuckled in response. “So, how do you like your first walk through the capital so far?”

“I love it,” Clara mumbled instantly, her mouth still filled with biscuits. “Can we do that again?”

“Of course,” he confirmed. “I mean, would be a shame if I just blew a hole into your wall and we never used it.”

“Can we do it tomorrow?” Clara asked excitedly.

All of a sudden, the Doctor's hearts sank just a little when he realized he had to disappoint her, but Missy wouldn't allow him to blow her off another time and the last thing he wanted was for his friend to become suspicious.

“I promised a friend I would meet her tomorrow,” the Doctor explained. “But I'll come back the day after, okay?”

Clara grinned at him in response and nodded and then something completely unexpected happened as she flung her arms around his neck. The Doctor was taken by surprise when she hugged him and for a moment he wasn't really sure what to do besides awkwardly waving his arms around behind her back.

“Thank you,” she said sincerely.

“Uhm,” he stammered, still unsure what to think about the sudden physical contact, “you're welcome?”

Only when Clara released him from her embrace and smiled at him again did the Doctor realize he had actually enjoyed it. It was a strange feeling, a completely foreign one, but not entirely unpleasant.

“Shall we walk back?” he suggested.

In response, Clara frowned at him. “Can't we stay for a few more minutes?”

“Alright,” the Doctor agreed with a smile. “Five more minutes and then we head home.”

“Deal,” she said and reached for his arm again before they wandered deeper into the crowd.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the sweet comments, guys :) They brought a big, silly grin to my face!

Somehow, the Doctor had the feeling that his mentor was watching him more thoroughly than he did on any other ordinary day. Whenever he glanced over his shoulder, he found Stonix looking at him and it made the Doctor a little nervous. He had put the dimensional shift bomb back exactly the way he had found it. There was no way his mentor could know he had borrowed it, was there? But there was another matter, something that had gone through his head all night after he had brought Clara back safely.

“What do you know about the President's late wife?” the Doctor asked, hoping that Stonix would feel in the mood to answer his question. That wasn't always the case.

His mentor cocked an eyebrow at him. “You seem quite interested in our Lord President lately,” he remarked in response.

“Well,” the Doctor paused, “he _is_ our Lord President. And an interesting person.”

“And his private matters shouldn't concern you,” Stonix replied, but then blew the air out between his teeth. He was going to tell him, the Doctor just knew it. “I don't know much about his late wife, I only know that her death changed him. She had used up all her regenerations, so there was nothing left to be done but to upload her mind to the Matrix. She was a kind woman and I think she held Vankath back on many occasions. His politics became a lot more radical after her death and he became more isolated.”

The Doctor nodded slowly. Maybe that was why kept Clara under lock and key, because he was afraid to lose her, too. But even if that was the case, the Doctor thought that it was wrong to keep his daughter a prisoner in her own home and he felt all the more determined to help her out. Clara was a lovely woman with a spirit that was almost contagious once it was unleashed. He really, really liked her.

“Your newly found interest in our leader isn't why you stole the dimensional shift bomb, is it?”

The Doctor's head shot up and for a moment, he had no idea what to say.

“How did you know?”

His mentor didn't reply, instead, he just granted the Doctor a stern look.

“I didn't steal it, I borrowed it. I took it to fix the invisibility setting,” he lied. Well, it wasn't exactly a lie because he had indeed fixed the setting even though it hadn't been his primary goal.

“And I think I remember telling you not to,” Stonix replied.

“I just wanted to prove that I could.”

His mentor sighed and the Doctor knew that he was in for a lecture when suddenly the door burst open and Missy walked into the room without even a single knock. She stood there, arms akimbo, staring at him expectantly.

“I believe we had a date.”

The Doctor was about to open his mouth and tell her that he wasn't done helping Stonix, but then he realized that his friend was providing him with the perfect opportunity to get out of a thorough scolding. And maybe by tomorrow, his mentor would have forgotten all about the dimensional shift bomb and his questions about the Lord President.

“Right,” he replied and turned towards his mentor, granting him a shrug. “Well, you said I should go out more often.”

Stonix sighed, but eventually, he smiled. “Go,” he said softly.

 

The Doctor didn't stick around for his mentor to change his mind, he grabbed the bag he had already prepared this morning because he had known that Missy would drag him out today and together they made their way into the Cloisters.

There were several paths outside the city and only some had been found and sealed shut by the President when he had erected the protective shield, but luckily for them, they hadn't bothered to check the subterranean paths that led through the ruins of the old capital or the graveyard and especially not the Cloisters. Most Time Lords were afraid of them, afraid of the ghosts and the spirits unleashed by the dying TARDISes, but as it was, the path through the Cloisters was the easiest way to the outside. The Doctor had taken it so many times that he had lost his fear of whatever was down here and so had Missy.

“Does it still give you the creeps?” Missy wanted to know when they walked right through a data ghost. They looked scary, but the Doctor had soon learned that they were harmless and couldn't really do anything.

“Only a little,” he replied and his gaze wandered to another path that he knew led straight to a repair shop. It seemed handy because when they realized a TARDIS was beyond repair, they sent it straight down here to die among her sisters. The Doctor wondered if that would happen to the one currently illuminating Gallifrey's night sky when they managed to catch her again. Maybe he should try to beat them to it, take her, steal her and run away before the Time Lords could get their hands on her. “Do you really want to stay on this planet? Forever?”

The Doctor didn't know why he was asking her that question again. The last time he had, Missy had called him silly, but he still remembered the time they had promised each other to visit every single star in the universe together. They had been children then, but a part of him still wanted to hold on to that promise.

“I don't know,” Missy admitted. “I don't think so.”

The Doctor turned his head and looked at her as they walked deeper into the Cloisters. “Last time you said you wanted to stay. When did you change your mind?”

Even in the darkness, he could see Missy roll her eyes. “I'm a woman now. I change my mind every few minutes,” she replied.

The Doctor only glowered at her.

“What?” she snapped. “You try a sex change and see what it's like.”

“Maybe some other time,” he growled and looked ahead. Not long and they would reach the exit at the foot of the mountain. From there, it was only a short walking distance to the camp of one of the Shobogan tribes.

 

The fields of red grass seemed grey in the moonlight and the Doctor realized that when he took Clara out here for the first time, it would have to be in daylight or she wouldn't be able to see the beauty of it at all.

“So, what have you been up to these past few days?” Missy asked him all of a sudden as if she was able to read his thoughts and detect Clara in them.

“Oh, not much,” he lied. He couldn't tell her. Not now. Not ever. Missy wouldn't understand and maybe she would try to prevent any further meetings with Clara. “Just helping Stonix with his experiments. I fixed the invisibility setting on his dimensional shift bomb last night.”

“He didn't seem pleased about that,” she noted.

A rustling ahead of them told the Doctor that they were no longer alone and he listened closely to the steps and counted. Two feet. Not a danger.

“Seems like we've got company,” Missy muttered under her breath. “Here comes the savage.”

“Don't call them that,” he hissed right before a boy jumped out of the grass and beamed broadly at them.

“Doctor!”

“Aeden,” the Doctor smiled happily, recognizing the boy even in the dim moonlight. “How are you doing?”

“It's been forever since you last visited!” Aeden complained. “We thought you weren't gonna come anymore!”

“Oh, why would you think that?”

The boy shrugged.

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes!” Aeden replied in an instant and his gaze wandered towards the Doctor's bag, already knowing what was inside.

The Doctor granted him a smile. “Well, let's go back to your camp and we'll have a look at what I've got in here,” he said and lifted his bag. “Now run along and tell them to secure us a seat.”

The boy grinned once again before he turned around on his heels and darted off in the direction of the nearest Shobogan camp. The Doctor could already see their fires from the distance and his hearts sank a little. It didn't seem right they were locked out of the city, that they had to live out here, enduring the weather and the animal attacks without proper shelter, that they had to go hungry while the Time Lords in the Citadel had everything they needed and more. The food he had brought wouldn't feed them for long, but it was the best he could do.

The Doctor sighed and continued his stride towards the camp while Missy was giggling gleefully right next to him. She had no idea. Somehow, his best friend seemed to only care about herself.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your sweet comments :)

From the other side of the fire, the Doctor watched Missy down her drink, laughing while the Shobogans she had dragged into her drinking game struggled to keep up. Their physiology was a little different from that of the Time Lords and while their intoxication never lasted longer than half an hour, the Doctor had already watched some of the Shobogans pass out or even vomit. They couldn't win, not against Missy. But that wasn't what bothered him tonight.

He had visited the Shobogans for years now and he had slowly watched the circumstances under which they lived deteriorate. Missy had only been there half the time, but she should have noticed it, too. She should have noticed that the children got thinner every time they saw them, that the circles under the grown Shobogans' eyes grew darker as the time passed. Things weren't going well for them, but it seemed that Missy was turning a blind eye, just like the rest of the Time Lords. She came here to enjoy herself and for no other reason. Somehow, it made the Doctor angry.

“Thank you for the food,” a woman said next to him and the Doctor turned his head to see that Malaya had sat down to his left. “Aeden is over the moon.”

“It's the least I could do,” he mumbled in response and sipped his drink. The alcohol was another thing that changed constantly because it seemed to grow stronger as their problems grew. “I just wish I could do more.”

Malaya sighed. “If only more Time Lords were like you,” she said, her voice heavy. Then she paused for a long time before she continued. “Did you know the Time Lords have expanded their wheat fields south of the city again? They almost reach up to the mountains now.”

The Doctor turned his head and looked at the woman's troubled face. “I didn't know,” he admitted. “What about the tribe that lived there?”

“They had to move, of course,” Malaya said with a shrug. “They have it worse than we do. They lost all of their crops. They just woke up one morning and there was a shield separating them from their fields and the Time Lords had already arrived with their machines.”

“I'm sorry,” the Doctor replied sincerely. “I really didn't know.”

“It's affecting us, too,” Malaya admitted heavily as her gaze trailed off to some point on the horizon. “Their tribe is twice the size of ours and we've run into many of them already while we were out on a hunt. It's getting harder to catch enough food as it is. It's only a matter of time until one tribe has to move beyond the mountains.”

“You can't!” he blurted out in the instant. “There is nothing but desert behind those mountains and it's too close to the Death Zone! That's suicide!”

“ _WHOHOOO!_ ” Missy's loud, triumphant voice cut through the chatter and the crackling of the fire and when the Doctor looked up, he noticed that she had obviously won her drinking game against the two Shobogans that had slumped down next to her. He shook his head and decided to focus on Malaya again.

“It doesn't matter what we do, we're starving either way,” she told him.

“There has to be another way,” the Doctor insisted. “ _Any_ way. As soon as you cross those mountains, there's nothing to protect you from what they keep in the Death Zone.”

Malaya granted him a soft smile. “If we could get enough food to cross the desert-”

“The Death Zone is in the desert!”

“We just have to try!” she half shouted at him. “I can't watch my boy starve to death! Don't get me wrong, Doctor, we are more than grateful for everything you're doing for us, but you said it yourself, it's just not enough. Not for all of us.”

Even though it hurt to hear her say it, the Doctor couldn't deny that she was right. He alone couldn't feed the entire Shobogan tribe, no matter how much food he smuggled out of the capital, but he refused to accept that walking straight through the Death Zone was their only option. If only the Time Lords would stop hiding behind their shield and do something about the starving children in front of their doorstep.

“What if we found a way to disable the shield so you could get into the Citadel?” he suggested out of the blue. “Maybe once you were inside, the Time Lords-"

The woman scoffed. “They would slaughter us, men, women and children alike. They hate us.”

“I don't hate you,” the Doctor argued. “And Missy doesn't. Maybe if they realized you're not so different-”

He broke off when he saw the look on Malaya's face and he knew that he was being too optimistic about his own people. No, just letting them into the capital wasn't how he could save the Shobogans. But he wouldn't allow them to just walk straight into their deaths beyond the mountains. There was no way.

“I'll think of something,” he said and took another sip from his drink. “Just give me time.”

* * *

It was a night like any other, a completely ordinary night and yet, Clara felt utterly restless. It was crazy how the Doctor had managed to change her entire life in less than a week and now Clara found it impossible to go back to her normal routine. She felt excited, she felt alive, possibly for the first time in her life. Finally, she was free.

Clara hadn't realized it until a few hours ago when her father had retreated to his office and she had gone out into the garden like she had done on every night. Only today she could go further if she wanted to. There was no one and nothing holding her back. Not her father. Not the wall he had put around her garden. She could just step through the wall and go wherever she liked.

As she made her way to the back of the garden, to the invisible hole in the wall, Clara tried to ignore the voice in the back of her head that told her it would be better to wait for the Doctor, that it would be a wise decision not to go out alone just yet. What would happen if she got lost or someone asked her who she was? She had only walked through the Citadel once and she didn't remember the road they had taken to get to the market, but that wasn't really where she was going to go anyway. No, Clara just wanted to get out and for the simple reason that she could. The Doctor had said it himself, the Citadel wasn't a dangerous place and even though she hardly knew him, Clara believed him.

She stopped in front of the hole and hesitated for a moment, her hearts pounding in her chest. Clara had no idea what was going to happen if she went out on her own and somehow the prospect of the unknown excited her even more. The Doctor had rekindled the fire in her that she had completely forgotten she had and there was no putting it out now. She stepped through the hole.

The city looked just as magnificent as it had the previous night and Clara found herself giggling at the sight. She was free to go wherever she pleased with no one to stop her and no one to tell her what to do, not even the Doctor. She walked aimlessly through the streets, careful to remember which turns she had taken to find her way back, and her eyes grew bigger with every new thing she discovered. Somehow she had been so distracted by the Doctor last night that she hadn't even paid attention to the sight in front of her eyes, at least not properly. She had never really seen the houses that people lived in or how many cats there were on Gallifrey's streets. Clara stopped for one of them and was delighted when the animal let her pet it.

“Aren't you a cute one,” she said and smiled at the cat. It was a red one again, maybe the same that had somehow found its way into her garden and it was purring as she scratched its ears.

Clara was so focused on the animal that she forgot everything else for a moment, so focused that she didn't even hear the footsteps creeping up behind her until the cat suddenly uttered a hissing sound and fled. Only then did she notice the shadow looming over her. She spun around and screamed.


	10. Chapter 10

The man was almost a giant and Clara wasn't even sure whether _man_ was the right word for him. His hair was a mess, his face dirty and he was dressed only in rags. When he produced a knife and pressed her against the nearest wall, holding the blade to her throat, Clara didn't have a single doubt that this man was one of the Shobogans, the people her father had always warned her about. The Doctor had lied to her. The Citadel was a dangerous place after all.

“Give me your money!” the man growled, his voice hushed so they couldn't be heard.

Clara attempted to struggle against his grip, but when she tried, the blade dug into her skin. Her hearts were pounding when she realized she was out of options, that she was trapped again and this time it was worse. This time there was no getting away.

“Money!”

She opened her mouth, but no matter how hard she tried, no sound came out. For the first time in her life, Clara realized what it was like to be afraid. She had to try, she had to speak, reason with him and above all, she had to get away. But her fear had left her paralysed.

Clara uttered another scream when the blade pierced her skin, a sharp sensation running through her entire neck as it cut through and finally, she found her voice again.

“I don't have any,” she howled in despair, but Clara had given up her struggle because she knew it would only result in further pain.

“I don't believe you,” her attacker spat. His face was so close to her own that she could smell his breath. It reeked of foulness and rotten teeth. “Money, now!”

“I don't-”

“Liar!” the Shobogan shouted and Clara whimpered when he held the knife a little higher. That was it. Her end. She would die and regenerate in the middle of the street, killed by a Shobogan over something she couldn't give him even if she wanted to. Clara closed her eyes and submitted to her fate.

 

“Clara!”

She heard his voice and for a moment, Clara believed it to be a product of her imagination, but as she opened her eyes again, the Doctor was really there, standing just a few steps away from them. He looked worried and his hands were raised in a conciliating gesture. Her hearts leapt with joy for a brief moment, until she remembered the knife at her throat. It wasn't over yet.

“Listen to me,” the Doctor said towards the Shobogan, his voice calm and hushed. “You don't wanna do this. You don't wanna hurt anyone, am I right?”

Her attacker didn't reply and he didn't withdraw the knife. Whatever the Doctor was trying to do, it wasn't working.

“I don't have any food, but I'll give you all the money I have on me,” the Doctor promised him and to Clara's dismay, he stepped closer. She opened her mouth, trying to tell him to stay away, but she was still frozen in fear. If he came closer, there was no saying what the Shobogan would do. “That's what you want, isn't it? Food?”

To her utter surprise, her attacker nodded.

“Don't worry, I'm here to help,” the Doctor said calmly. “Do you have a family? Children?”

The Shobogan hesitated, but for some reason, Clara felt him loosen his grip on her. “Two daughters,” the man replied reluctantly.

In response, the Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins that he held out towards the Shobogan while still keeping a good distance between them. Clara realized that to reach them, he would have to let her go. But the Shobogan didn't move.

“You can go to the market and buy food with this, enough to feed your daughters for a week. How does that sound?” the Doctor asked, granting the man a smile.

“Is that a trick?” the Shobogan barked and suddenly Clara felt the knife dig into her skin again. “Are you trying to trick me?”

“No trick,” he promised. “I'm just trying to help. I'm the Doctor.”

And just like that, the cold metal blade was gone, but Clara was still too afraid to move. There was something about the Shobogan that had changed at the mention of the Doctor's name, but she couldn't quite explain what that was.

“Ah, you've heard of me, haven't you?” The Doctor smiled at him and took another step. Her attacker could almost reach the money now. “Take it. And buy some biscuits for your daughters. They'll love them.”

It all happened too fast for Clara to comprehend. In a sudden movement, the Shobogan had let go of her and grabbed the money out of the Doctor's hand and before she knew what was happening, the man dashed down the street and disappeared behind the nearest corner.

Clara was still looking after him, trying to catch her breath, when the Doctor's hands reached for her arms and he brought her back to reality.

“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice full of concern.

She swallowed and managed to nod, but the more time passed the more aware she became that the wound the Shobogan had inflicted on her was stinging.

The Doctor had noticed it immediately and he proceeded to rub his hands together until they emitted a golden regenerative glow and she didn't even have time to step back before he placed his hand on her wound.

“What are you-”

“Shhh,” he hushed her and then it was over. The pain had stopped and the Doctor's hand had returned to normal as he withdrew it from her. “There. All good.”

Clara looked at him for a long moment, but she had no idea what to say to him. She couldn't even utter a thank you because right now, her head was a mess. She didn't understand one bit of it. The Shobogan attack. The Doctor showing up to save her. Somehow, his name had made her attacker stop.

She was hardly aware that the Doctor laid his arm around her shoulder and started to walk her back home, but the touch felt nice and slowly Clara was beginning to make sense of it.

“Thank you,” was the first thing she said when she finally regained her speech. “You saved me.”

“Ah, that wasn't a big deal,” the Doctor replied with a dismissive gesture. “He wouldn't have hurt you, not really.”

Clara's head shot around and she frowned at him. “He held a knife to my throat!”

The Doctor hesitated and his face took on a sombre expression.

“The Shobogans aren't evil or violent, no matter what people say about them,” he explained. “They're not that different from us, Clara. They just want to live in peace, but the Time Lords are mistreating them. They're pushing them further back into the wilderness, taking their food sources. It's not their fault.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about them,” Clara noted warily. He had already mentioned that it was easy for him to leave the city, but now she realized that there was more to it than just that.

“They live in tribes outside the capital with their families and friends and that's all they really care about,” the Doctor said. “He would've left you in peace as soon as he realized you had no money. They don't want to harm anyone, but they're starving.”

“Again, he held a knife to my throat,” Clara growled and somehow she was getting a little angry that the Doctor was defending her attacker rather than her.

“Have you ever been hungry?” the Doctor asked her, taking her a little by surprise.

Clara frowned at him. “Of course. Everyone's been hungry at some point. What has that to do with anything?”

“Well, imagine being hungry for days, weeks, months. How would that make you feel?”

She considered her answer for a moment, but somehow she knew that the Doctor had already figured her answer out before her. “I'd get angry,” she realized.

He chuckled softly. “Now, imagine someone was eating a steak next to you while you haven't had proper food in months. What then?”

Clara sighed. She understood it now, but that didn't make it easier for her. All her life, her father had told her that the Shobogans were evil, that they were different, that they needed to be locked out or locked away to protect the Time Lords. But what if it was the other way around? What if it was the Time Lords that were evil?

The Doctor cocked an eyebrow at her and Clara realized that he was still waiting for her answer.

“I'd get angry at the person who's eating,” she replied heavily.

They came to a halt in a dead-end street and Clara realized that the Doctor had taken her home without her even noticing it and her hearts felt heavy when she realized that her first walk through the city had ended in a disaster. Even if the Shobogan hadn't intended to hurt her, the scare still sat deep in her bones.

“Will you be okay?” the Doctor asked her. “I'm sorry, I can't help but feel that it was my fault. I should have been here.”

Clara shook her head. “It was my idea to go out alone,” she reassured him. “And I'll be fine.”

When the Doctor smiled at her, it somehow lifted her spirits. Everything was going to be fine and she would recover from the shock. Everything was going to be fine because she had the Doctor now. Clara was no longer alone.

“I'll come and visit you tomorrow,” he promised.

“Thank you,” she replied sincerely, but all the words in her language couldn't express the gratitude she felt right now, so instead of saying anything else, Clara went up on tiptoes and left a soft kiss on the Doctor's cheek.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the comments :)  
> Ok, how long do you think before those two will get into trouble? ;)

The Doctor sorted the last scroll back onto the shelf and sighed to himself. Some days, he wondered how he had ended up here in the library and even though helping Stonix with his experiments was exciting, most of the time his work here was really quite dull. His mentor had said that he would find his place on Gallifrey, but the more time the Doctor actually spent on this planet, the more he doubted it.

Behind him, the Doctor noticed his mentor lock the dimensional shift bomb into his safe and even though the didn't need it any longer, his sudden distrust somehow bothered him. No matter how dull the work was, his mentor was a good man and the Doctor liked him.

“Don't worry,” he said quietly. “I'm not gonna take it again if that's what you're afraid of.”

“That isn't what worries me,” Stonix replied in a sombre tone as he straightened himself up and looked at the Doctor. “I still don't know why you took it in the first place.”

“I told you, I was just fixing the invisibility setting.”

His mentor's gaze fixed on him and for a long moment he said nothing at all, but it was plain as pikestaff that Stonix didn't believe a word he said. The Doctor was beginning to grow a little nervous.

“I don't know what you're planning, Doctor, but you need to be careful,” his mentor warned him.

“I'm not planning anything,” he argued in response, but his mentor quickly silenced him with a gesture.

“And above all, stop asking questions about the Lord President.”

The Doctor inhaled deeply and opened his mouth to respond, but Stonix cut him off once again.

“He suspects that you're sneaking out of the capital,” he told him. “He asked about you a while ago, about what you're up to.”

He stopped dead in his tracks when he heard his mentor say these words and frowned. Not for a moment did the Doctor believe that his mentor would tell on him. “Does he know for sure?”

Stonix shook his head. “But you should stay away from him and his personal business.”

Technically, the Doctor wasn't the least bit interested in the President, just in his daughter. The rest, well, as long as Vankath didn't have proof, nothing would happen to him and he doubted that any Time Lord would be brave enough to actually follow him through the Cloisters. The Doctor shrugged. “Alright,” he replied. “I can do that.”

His mentor eyed him with suspicion, but the Doctor didn't want to stick around to hear the rest of the lecture. He quickly excused himself and headed outside.

* * *

The Doctor was careful when he made his way towards the President's mansion and glanced over his shoulder more than once. It was silly. He wasn't being followed, the Doctor was sure of that when he hadn't seen a single person in over a minute as he closed in on the dead-end street. Once he had arrived, the Doctor stuck his head through the wall and instantly spotted Clara sitting on a large stone.

“Hey there,” he said happily and stepped through.

Clara jumped up from her seat and greeted him with a bright smile. “Hello Doctor,” she replied and pushed herself up on tiptoes to give him a kiss on the cheek.

She had done that last night and it somehow made his hearts flutter when her lips touched his skin, but in a strangely positive way. His smile widened at the sight of her.

“Where are we gonna go today?” she asked excitedly and in response, the Doctor held up a basket.

“We're gonna stay right here. I've brought picnic stuff,” he replied.

The hint of disappointment in her eyes didn't slip his notice and he quickly went to justify his decision to stay inside today.

“Well, I figured that you'd want a more quiet evening after yesterday's shock,” he explained. “And I've brought Murdis.”

Finally, Clara smiled at him. “Sounds like a great idea.”

 

They moved into the forest and soon found a suitable clearing where the Doctor went to spread the blanket he had brought over the red grass and Clara sank down with a sigh. Instantly, she bent over the basket and went through its contest to see what else he had brought and only a few minutes later they were leaning back and munching the food.

“This is nice,” Clara remarked and turned her head towards the sky. The suns were setting and the first stars had already come out. It was a warm, wonderful night.

“Agreed,” he mumbled in response, his mouth full. “But tomorrow I'm going to show you around the Citadel a little more.”

“You'll come back tomorrow?” Clara enquired as if she hadn't been sure he was really going to come back on a regular basis.

The Doctor swallowed his food and looked at her, studied her for a moment. Even when she was smiling, Clara seemed sad and the Doctor could only imagine how lonely it must have been for her up until now with no other company than her father and the servants.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course I'll come back. Why do you think I blew a hole in your wall?”

He chuckled and Clara uttered a small laugh with him, but quickly glance away, pretending to focus on the Murdis.

“I'm sure you have other friends,” she remarked almost absent-mindedly.

The Doctor sighed. Maybe he should tell her, just to clear his own thoughts about the matter because there were some things about Missy he would really like to get off his chest. “Missy,” he said. “We've been friends since we were children, his father owned a big estate that was surrounded by large fields of red grass. We used to run through them. I thought we were the same.”

Clara raised her head and the tiniest frown appeared on her face. “It sounds like you're no longer sure?”

“Missy is, well-” the Doctor broke off, exhaling sharply. “I don't know what she is. She's still my friend but it's different. She's. . . different. I'm not sure if we still care about the same things. It was so much easier when we were young, when we both didn't really fit in.”

Clara nodded understandingly, but the Doctor knew that she couldn't possibly understand what was going through his head. She had probably never had a friend like Missy. Or maybe she had. There was only one way to find out.

“What about you? Did you really spend all of your life on your own?”

The question seemed to take her by surprise, the Doctor could tell by the startled look in her eyes as if he had suddenly awoken some memories she would have loved to keep buried in her mind. Clara seemed even sadder than before.

“I had a tutor once,” she said and swallowed. “I never went to the Academy, my father wouldn't allow it, but he insisted that I got a proper education, so he hired a tutor who came to my house every day.”

The Doctor smiled at her in an attempt to encourage her to continue and finally, he coaxed a smile from her in return. Or maybe it was the memory of her tutor that made her smile. The Doctor thought he preferred the first option.

Clara chuckled. “He was mad. He had only just graduated from the academy himself and I'm not sure why my father picked _him_ to be my tutor, he seemed like the least likely choice. But he was my friend, the only friend I ever had,” she confessed and the sadness had returned to her voice. Somehow the Doctor got the impression that their friendship hadn't ended well. “He was so clever and kind and he always made me laugh.”

“What happened to him?” the Doctor found himself asking. He couldn't quite explain why, but the idea of her tutor bothered him a little. It was as if there was an unspoken competition between him and another Time Lord Clara didn't even seem to be in contact with any longer. The Doctor wanted to be the one to make her laugh and he would certainly make her laugh more than her tutor had.

Eventually, Clara continued her story. “One day he decided to take me out into the city,” she explained. “He said a young Time Lady like me shouldn't waste away in captivity, that I should go out and see Gallifrey for myself, not just read about it.”

“I assume you father didn't take well to the idea?” he asked carefully.

Clara lowered her head. “He used a neural block and erased all of his memories of me. I never saw him again. He doesn't even know who I am any longer,” she admitted and for a moment the Doctor thought she was going to cry. He wasn't sure how much time had passed since the loss of her friend, but he realized that Clara hadn't forgotten about it and maybe she never would. Her father had taken her only friend from her and what was probably worse was that he was still out there with no idea who Clara was and what he was missing out on.

“Well, he's an idiot,” the Doctor determined.

Clara's head shot back up and she frowned at him. “Excuse me?”

“First of all, he shouldn't have asked your father's permission, he should've just stolen you,” he reasoned.

Luckily for him, his remark made Clara chuckle. “You say that as if I'm property to be stolen.”

“Second, he's an idiot for forgetting you,” the Doctor said and granted her a smile. “I don't think anyone in his right mind could forget you, neural block or not.”

Clara smiled at him in return.

“Third, you've got a new friend now,” he said. “And I sure as Rassilon's damnation won't ask your father for permission before I take you out into the city tomorrow. Who knows, maybe we can find out what became of your tutor.”

“You could get caught,” she reasoned. “And I think my father would do worse things to you than erase your memory.”

“I don't care,” the Doctor insisted firmly. “I am your friend.”

All of a sudden, Clara reached out and took his hand, squeezing it softly in her own. “Thank you,” she replied with a smile.

Her grateful smile was all the confirmation the Doctor needed. He didn't care about how much trouble he would be in if he was caught. He wouldn't get caught and even if, Clara was worth the risk.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your sweet comments :) Keep it going, I'm enjoying your theories and guesses :D

Somehow, the Citadel seemed even more magnificent than before and Clara held on tight to his the Doctor's arm as they walked along the streets so as not to lose him while she was busy gawking at the sight in front of her eyes. She loved it, every bit of it. She loved the buildings, the dome that rose high up into the sky, reflecting the waning light of the twin suns and plunging the entire city into a golden glow. She loved the smell of food and drinks from the market they had passed mere minutes ago. She loved the people all around her who were hurrying past and laughing and chatting with their friends. It was amazing and so much better than she could have ever imagined. But something had come as a surprise. Clara had always thought the Time Lords wore their robes and nothing else because she had seen it in her books, but the people she saw on the streets wore all kinds of clothing. The men sometimes wore trousers instead of their robes, like the Doctor did. And the woman, well, they wore the most beautiful gowns Clara had ever seen and suddenly she found herself wanting one even though she would have to hide it from her father and could never truly wear it.

“Clara,” the Doctor said carefully and she turned her head to look at him. For some reason, he didn't meet her gaze. “I would like to show you something.”

She smiled in response. Whatever it was, Clara already knew that she would love it. She loved everything she had seen so far. “Sure, what is it?”

“Not right now, not immediately,” the Doctor added. “But at some point, I would like to take you out of the city.”

Clara came to an abrupt halt and let go of his arm as she looked at him. His suggestion had certainly taken her by surprise and she wasn't quite sure what to think about it. Sneaking out of her garden to wander through the city was one thing and if they got caught, they would be in big trouble. But leaving the city without permission was a crime.

The Doctor had obviously sensed her reluctance because he stopped next to her and gently placed his hand on her upper arm. “Like I said, we don't have to do it right now. There are so many things within in the Citadel that I wanna show you first, but I think you should meet them at some point. The Shobogans. You should see it for yourself, what it's like for them, see that they're not a danger.”

“But leaving the capital-”

“Is a crime, I know,” the Doctor responded softly. “I know a way in and out of the city where no one's going to spot us. It leads through the Cloisters.”

Suddenly, the idea seemed even less appealing than it had before. Clara had read about the Cloisters and she had heard talk among her servants and according to them, it was the most dangerous place on Gallifrey right after the Death Zone.

“But what about the ghosts?” Clara enquired.

The Doctor smiled at her and shrugged. “They're just ghosts,” he explained. “They can't harm you, no matter how scary they look.”

Clara bit down on her lip and hesitated. She didn't want to look like a coward in front of the Doctor who seemed afraid of nothing, not even ghosts or breaking the law, but maybe this was taking it a little too far.

“Ah well,” the Doctor said with a smile. “Let's explore Gallifrey first and talk about the rest later.”

“Okay,” Clara agreed and took his arm again as they resumed their walk and suddenly a thought came to her mind. “What do you do? I mean, here on Gallifrey? When you're not busy stealing the President's daughter?”

The Doctor turned his head and chuckled. “I thought you weren't property to steal?” he asked back and when Clara failed to reply, the Doctor looked ahead and nodded towards a large building. “The library. I help out Stonix who is sort of the librarian and a scientist. He tends to the books and he studies them and he invents all kinds of things, like the dimensional shift bomb I used to blow a hole in your wall.”

Clara scoffed in response. Somehow she couldn't picture the Doctor counting books. “That seems like a boring job for a man like you.”

“It is,” he agreed and for a moment, Clara thought he looked like even he wasn't sure how exactly he had ended up there. Then his head shot around to look at her. “What about you?”

“Me?” She frowned. “You know I never got to go outside before.”

“That's not what I meant,” he replied and again, he looked thoughtful. “I know the President is your father, but what about your mother?”

Clara shrugged in response. “I don't have one.”

She wasn't quite sure why the Doctor seemed so surprised at her reply. Time Lords were loomed, not born and it had been that way for a very long time. Just because Clara shared the genetic material with another Time Lady didn't mean that she had to have a mother. It had just been her and her father, no one else. Clara had always assumed that her mother must have been uploaded to the Matrix before she had come out of the loom.

“Aren't you curious though?” the Doctor prompted her.

“Well,” she hesitated, frowning at him, “maybe a little?”

 

The Doctor fell silent and Clara didn't really know what else to say, so she decided to remain quiet for a while as they walked further into the city, away from the market and the library, further away from her home than she had ever been. Clara realized that after her encounter with the Shobogan she should have been afraid or at least wary, but she wasn't, not with the Doctor next to her. There was something about him that made her feel safe even though she had only known him for a few days. Somehow it felt as if they belonged together.

“The TARDIS is gone.” The Doctor's voice tore her from her thoughts and instinctively, Clara looked up into the sky and realized that he was right. The light above the Citadel was gone and somehow Clara thought the Doctor was sad about that fact.

He scoffed. “I wonder what they'll do to her,” he said thoughtfully.

“Why? What are they gonna do?” Clara enquired because she genuinely had no idea.

“Maybe they'll try to fix her, keep her from breaking out again,” the Doctor explained with a sigh. “If they can't, they'll send her to the TARDIS graveyard.”

“But it's still working,” she argued.

The Doctor turned his head and looked at her and suddenly there was a hint of a mischievous smile on his lips. “I thought about stealing her, you know? I've always wanted to leave Gallifrey, see the universe, visit every single star in the sky until I've seen everything there is to see.”

Clara chuckled nervously. She thought it was a terrible idea and terribly dangerous. “But you can't. It's against the law,” she argued.

The Doctor sighed and she watched him look up into the night sky again. There was a sudden longing in his gaze that broke her hearts once she understood what it meant. He really wanted to leave this place and he didn't have the slightest intention to come back anytime soon.

“One day,” he said determinedly. “One day I will.”

A sudden wave of nausea, a hint of panic came over her as he said those words. The Doctor couldn't leave Gallifrey, not now, not ever. He just couldn't fly away and leave her because if he did, she would be alone again. Only this time it would be worse because he was leaving her with the memory of a friendship she hadn't been able to hold on to. Clara couldn't go through it, not again. Somehow she would have to make him stay.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys for your sweet comments :) You asked about deepening plot? Well, let's have a look at this:

Clara was careful when she stepped into her father's office. He bent over some paperwork and seemed lost in whatever they said, so she felt a little guilty to disturb him, but her curiosity had been sparked and there was no putting it out now. She just had to know.

Clara cleared her throat and her father looked up. It took him a moment, but eventually, he smiled. “What can I do for you, sweetheart?” he asked kindly.

“Oh, not much,” she replied and plopped down on a chair on the other side of the desk. “We haven't spent so much time together lately. I just wanted to know what you're working on.”

In response, her father shoved the papers aside and blew the air out between his lips. “Nothing pleasant, that's for sure,” he said. “I was reading the latest reports about crimes committed by the Shobogans within the capital. They're increasing, becoming more frequent.”

Clara bit down on her lip, unable to tell her father about her own encounter with one of them, but the longer she thought about it, the more sense the Doctor's words made to her. They were starving, of course they would do everything to feed their families and stealing from those who had more than enough seemed like the most plausible thing to do.

“But that's not why you really came to talk to me, is it?”

Clara's head shot up and she noticed her father throw her an inquisitive, yet kind look. She sighed. “I wanted to ask you about my mother,” she explained quietly.

The President sank back in his chair and the way his body instantly slumped down made Clara think his shoulders were heavy, as if they carried an incredible weight.

“I suppose this conversation has been coming for a while,” he said quietly. “I was wondering when you would start asking questions about her.”

Clara smiled at him in an attempt to encourage him to go on.

In response, her father leaned forward on his desk and sighed. “Your mother was an incredible Time Lady, Clara. And I loved her with all my hearts,” he said and when he spoke, Clara thought she could still hear the sadness in his voice, the longing he still felt for her even after so many years. “She was the kindest woman I've ever met and very, very bright.”

“What happened to her?” Clara found herself asking.

Her father's head sank as he avoided her gaze. Yes, he was still sad, still heartbroken. “She died while you were still in the loom,” he explained. “The Shobogans killed her.”

“What?!” Clara gawked at him. “But how?!”

“Does it matter how?!” her father spat. There was anger in his voice now where a few seconds ago the sadness had resided. “Does it matter _how_ they killed her? She's dead and I'm going to hunt them down for what they did to her, _to me_!”

Clara flinched at the sudden sharpness of his voice and instinctively leaned back when her father rose from his seat, towering over her. She realized now that that was the Lord President in front of her, not her father.

“That is why you're never going to leave the house as long as the Shobogans are still alive!” he bellowed. “I'm gonna find a way! I'm gonna slaughter every single one of them until there is no one left and we can finally live in peace again! I owe that to you!”

“But-” Clara attempted to get a word in, but her father cut her off.

“Go to your room! Now!”

She didn't wait for him to repeat himself before she jumped up from her seat and darted out of her room. The last time her father had been so furious was when he had figured out what her mentor had really been up to and she dreaded to think what he would do if she disobeyed him at this point. But Clara understood now, at least to some extent, why her father hated the Shobogans so much, why he wanted to see them dead. He had loved her mother and they had taken her from him. And yet the Doctor's words resounded in her head and Clara wondered, she truly wondered which of them was wrong and if there even was a right thing to do at all.

* * *

“Come on, just let me have a look at it,” the Doctor begged, yet the Time Lord in front of him only stood up straight, barring the entrance and to his dismay, the gun he was carrying looked devastatingly real.

“I'm sorry, you're not authorized to be in the repair shop,” the guard replied even though he didn't sound sorry at all.

“Just a tiny glimpse,” he continued. “I'm sure that's allowed.”

The guard only glared at him in reply and it was obvious that to him the Doctor was nothing but a nuisance. He would never let him inside the TARDIS repair shop unless he came up with an official permit from the Lord President himself. The Doctor was never going to get in, at least not through the front door.

When he opened his mouth in a last attempt to persuade him, the Doctor suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder and he turned around to see that Missy had appeared next to him.

“I've been looking for you all over the Citadel!” she exclaimed. “Stonix wants a word with you.”

For a moment, the Doctor considered protesting, but at the sight of the guard stationed in front of the repair shop, he changed his mind.

 

Missy soon led him outside, but as their walk continued, he noticed that they hadn't taken the usual route to the library.

“Didn't you say Stonix asked to see me?” he enquired.

“No.” Missy sighed. “I just wanted to save you from an embarrassing situation and possible regeneration by gun wound. You do realize the guards aren't allowed to let anyone anywhere near a TARDIS?”

“It was worth a try,” he grumbled in response.

“I seriously don't condone your suicidal tendencies. Provoking armed guards-”

“I didn't provoke him, I asked nicely,” the Doctor argued.

“Sneaking out to the Shobogans-”

“What?!” he barked and turned his head, glaring at her. “I was under the impression that you were enjoying that, too.”

“And whatever else you are up to,” Missy finished her lecture. “I know you're up to _something_. I'm not stupid. And, like I said, try not to regenerate anytime soon. It took me long enough to get used to this grumpy face.”

The Doctor glowered at her in response.

“That's exactly what I'm talking about,” she said and gestured towards his face. “And I thought the one with the chin was silly.”

The Doctor fell silent next to her. The turn their conversation had taken had suddenly brought a few questions that he realized he had never truly asked.

“What was it like?” he wanted to know. “Regenerating into a woman?”

Missy merely shrugged. “Just like any other regeneration,” she replied, but her voice had lost some of its previous vigour. The Doctor knew what she meant. It felt like dying and not dying at the same time. It felt like being torn into pieces only to be reassembled again, a new person. It was confusing and he figured that it must be even more so to suddenly wake up as a woman.

“I don't really remember much of my last regeneration,” he admitted.

His friend frowned at him in reply. “Didn't you say it happened in the Cloisters?”

“I remember waking up there,” the Doctor said thoughtfully. Every bone in his new body had been hurting and he had been covered with bruises, caused by the stones that had collapsed on top of him. One of those had caused him to regenerate and the Doctor remembered walking aimlessly through the tunnels for what had felt like an eternity before finally emerging outside the Citadel. A Shobogan woman had found him and tended to his wounds before showing him the way back through the Cloisters. To this day the Doctor didn't know how he had come to be down there in the first place. But that was where it had started, his friendship with the Shobogans.

“So,” Missy began and arched up her eyebrows, “are you gonna tell me what else you're up to?”

The Doctor uttered a long sigh and then turned his head and grinned at Missy. “Only mischief.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the comments :) How about a nice Friday evening with some alone time for the Doctor and Clara?

The Doctor hurried through the streets of the Citadel, his bag slung loosely over his shoulder, eager to finally see Clara after a long, boring day in the library. Somehow it had become his new routine over the last few weeks and the Doctor couldn't quite explain what it was that just drew him back to her almost every single day. Was is the thrill? The danger of being caught? Was it the sadness in her insanely big, dark eyes? No, that wasn't it, none of it. It was the moments in which the Doctor was able to make her laugh, the expression of sheer astonishment when he showed her something new, their conversations. Some days it felt as if he had known her for years even though they had only just met. No, the Doctor was certain. It was destiny that had brought them together and he was meant to be with her.

The Doctor stuck his head through the wall and grinned when he spotted Clara already waiting for him. As usually, his hearts skipped a little beat.

“Doctor,” Clara said happily before she approached him and flung her arms around his neck in an embrace.

“Umpf,” he uttered, still not quite used to this kind of physical contact. It just wasn't what Time Lords usually did. They didn't touch or hug or kiss. Normally, their connection was on a different level, a mental rather than physical one, but how would Clara know when she had only had her father to talk to until recently?

The Doctor gently laid his hands on her back and let her hug him. The sensation wasn't a bad one, just a little bit confusing and strange.

“What are we gonna do today?” she enquired curiously.

In response, the Doctor grinned at her. She wasn't ready to leave the capital yet, to meet the Shobogans, but he had thought of something that might make Clara like them a little bit more. He reached into his bag and produced a bottle from the inside.

“Today I'm going to introduce you to a part of Shobogan culture and you're gonna love it,” the Doctor promised.

Clara raised her eyebrows and the Doctor watched her gaze wander back and forth between him and the bottle, but eventually, she shrugged. “I'll get our picnic blanket,” she said.

 

A short while later the Doctor sank down on the blanket in the middle of the forest and watched Clara lean back and look up at the stars while he prepared two glasses for them.

“The TARDIS has escaped again,” she said and pointed towards the sky. “Look!”

The Doctor raised his head and smiled to himself. “Good for her,” he remarked and then proceeded to pour them both the Shobogan alcohol before he handed a glass to Clara.

“What exactly is this?” she wanted to know and sniffed the contents, immediately wrinkling her nose. “Ew, this smells vile.”

The Doctor chuckled in response. “Yeah, it does a bit,” he replied. “But it doesn't taste as bad after a few glasses. The Shobogans brew it. If consumed in small doses, it makes them feel better.”

Clara only frowned at him and the Doctor understood her confusion. Even he had been confused in the beginning when the Shobogans had told him about the stimulants they consumed at times and he guessed that in a way it made a lot more sense for them as it did for the Time Lords.

“I don't know how to describe it,” he explained. “It's different for Time Lords though, doesn't quite have the same effect. We metabolize it too quickly.”

Still, Clara didn't seem quite convinced.

“It's harmless,” the Doctor said. “And, like I said, the effect isn't the same as on the Shobogans. Some of them get sad and emotional, other start singing or dancing. If they drink too much, they can even throw up. But Missy and I have been drinking this for years, nothing bad has ever happened.”

To show her that she had nothing to worry about, the Doctor downed the contents of his drink, but Clara was still hesitant and only stared at the glass in her hands.

“I never told you about a conversation I had with my father a while ago,” she confessed and still, she evaded his gaze. “He said the Shobogans killed my mother.”

“I'm sorry,” he replied sincerely. The Doctor hadn't known because he had listened to Stonix and stopped asking questions about the Lord President. Maybe it was time to find out a little more. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

“That's why he hates them, why he wants to kill them all.”

“The Council won't let him,” the Doctor tried to reassure her. “And the majority of them just wants to live in peace.”

Clara seemed to consider his words for a moment and then, in a swift movement, raised the glass to her lips and knocked back the contents. Her face distorted into a grimace.  
“Disgusting,” she complained.

The Doctor chuckled in response. “Yeah, that was my initial reaction, too,” he explained and leaned forward to refill her glass.

Clara frowned at him again. “I'm not feeling any different.”

“It takes a while,” he said and suddenly he felt a weight on his shoulder as Clara leaned against him with a sigh. The Doctor wasn't quite sure what to do about that. Should he move away? Put his arm around her? Physical contact was so confusing.

They both sipped their drinks in silence for a long while and somehow, right now, the Doctor was grateful for that. This was almost idyllic. Just being with Clara and watching the stars appear in the night sky one after one as the suns were sinking below the horizon.

“Did I ever tell you about how I met the Shobogans?”

He felt Clara shake her head against his shoulder. “No, I don't think so.”

The Doctor stared ahead, deep into the forest. It was getting darker by the minute. “I had just regenerated and I was confused and wandering through the Cloisters. I had no idea where I was or where I was going, but somehow I found the secret passageway to the outside and I guess I must have passed out again. When I woke up, I was in a bed in a Shobogan camp and this woman bent over me and tended to my wounds. She knew a lot about Time Lords and she knew about regeneration. She gave me food and drinks and helped me regain my strength before she showed me the way back into the capital.”

“That was nice of her,” Clara remarked.

“I came back to thank her a few weeks later and the Shobogans welcomed me like I was one of them. They had little to eat, but they made me stay for dinner. Everything about them was so warm and welcoming, so the next time I returned with food from the capital. That's how it started, how we became friends.”

Clara turned her head and looked at him. “I want to meet them,” she said. “But I'm confused. All my life I've heard nothing but bad things about them and then you show up and-”

“It's okay,” the Doctor reassured her. “There's still time. We don't have to go today or tomorrow.”

In response, Clara grinned and him and held up her glass to demand a refill. The Doctor poured her another drink and watched her down the contents.

“It's weird,” she replied. “Like my brain is lighter.”

The Doctor laughed. “Yeah, it starts like that.”

“Tell me, the Shobogans, are they really not violent?”

“Oh, well, they can be if provoked,” he said and chuckled. “Missy once picked a fight with six of them. That was nasty.”

“Well, I better not provoke them then,” she reasoned, smiling at him. Even in the fading light, the Doctor noticed how beautiful she looked right now. Dark eyes, flushed cheeks. Clara was beautiful.

He refilled their drinks again and leaned back, his gaze set on the stars high above them. The TARDIS really looked like a third moon tonight and the Doctor knew that somewhere out there, the Shobogans were looking at it, probably celebrating its reappearance. They were always looking for a reason to celebrate and the Doctor couldn't blame them. Anything to help them take their minds off the struggle.

“I'm gonna steal it one day,” the Doctor said thoughtfully. “I'm gonna steal it and leave this place and never come back.”

Clara turned her head and looked at him, her eyes suddenly wider than before.

“What?” he asked.

“Why are you saying things like that?” Clara wanted to know and her voice suddenly sounded incredibly small.

The Doctor wasn't quite sure what to respond to that, so he just frowned at her for a moment. “Because it's true,” he replied hesitantly. “Because that's what I want. I don't want to spend the rest of my life on Gallifrey.”

Quickly, Clara averted her eyes and the Doctor didn't know what had brought about the shift in her mood, but he was quite sure that it had something to do with what he had said.

“Clara?”

He heard her swallow. “You can't leave,” she said quietly.

“I'm not going to leave today or tomorrow-”

“But you're gonna leave eventually,” Clara finished his sentence.

“Yes?” The Doctor leaned forward to look into her face, but Clara turned her head away. “Clara, what's the matter?”

The next thing he heard was a sound that he hadn't expected and it stung deep, as if a knife had been stabbed straight into his hearts. Clara started sobbing.

“Clara, oh Rassilon's Ghost, I'm sorry,” he uttered instantly and put his glass aside to close his arms around Clara. When she finally turned around, the Doctor realized she was crying. “I'm so sorry, this is all my fault. This is a side effect of the alcohol. It makes you emotional.”

“You're gonna leave me,” she sobbed and in a sudden movement, she flung her arms around him and buried her face against his chest. “You're the only friend I have and you're gonna leave me.”

“I”m not gonna leave you, Clara,” the Doctor tried to reassure her, but Clara didn't stop. The Doctor thought he had never felt so useless and guilty as he was feeling right now. Clara was crying and it was all his fault.

“But you just said-” Her sentence was cut short by another sob and as the tears drenched his shirt, the Doctor realized she wasn't going to stop crying anytime soon.

He had no idea what to do, how to comfort her, but he so wanted to calm her down, make her feel better. This hadn't been his intention at all.

“It's just a side effect, Clara,” he whispered carefully and raised his hand to her head, carefully stroking her hair. It felt so soft under his palm. “It's the Shobogan drink that makes you feel like this, nothing else.”

“You can't leave me,” she wailed quietly. “You've made yourself essential to me.”

It was at this moment that the Doctor realized just how lonely Clara had truly been all this time and he realized that the loss of her mentor still sat too deep. She was afraid it was going to happen all over again. She was afraid to lose him and if the Doctor was entirely honest, he didn't want to lose her either. But would he stay on Gallifrey just for her? The Doctor couldn't say. That wasn't a promise he could make.

Instead, the Doctor pulled her a little more tightly against his chest and held her in his embrace. He vowed not to let her go until she had stopped crying.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your sweet comments, guys <3!!!

The Doctor cursed himself internally for having had the stupid idea to bring her the Shobogan alcohol and he cursed himself for not having warned her about the side effects. He had seen this sort of thing happen before, but he hadn't thought that it could also happen to a Time Lady. It was his fault.

Clara had fallen asleep out of sheer exhausting after what had seemed like hours of crying her eyes out, but she was still clutching his chest even in her sleep as if she was afraid he would be gone when she woke up. The Doctor was stroking her hair absent-mindedly and he still wasn't quite sure what to do. Leaving her out here wasn't an option, that much was obvious. But could he risk bringing her inside?

The Doctor raised his head and looked up at the big mansion at the end of the garden. A while ago, Clara had pointed out her room to him and he was sure that he could find it within the house, but could he do it without being seen? Then he turned his head to look the woman in his arms.

“Oh Clara,” he sighed heavily. “My Clara.”

Without really knowing why he did it, the Doctor bent down and left a kiss on her forehead and even though it didn't wake her up, he thought that Clara was smiling in her sleep. The decision was made.

As gently as he could, the Doctor swept her up in his arms and carried her in the direction of the house. If he was seen, he would be in so much trouble, but he reasoned that by now the servants would have retreated to rest.

“Doctor,” Clara mumbled sleepily and opened her eyes, blinking at him. “What are you doing?”

He hushed her softly, knowing that she would protest as soon as she knew what he was up to. “Just sleep,” he told her with a smile. “You're going to wake up with a nasty headache tomorrow.”

Luckily for him, Clara did as she was told and her head fell back against his chest where his hearts were hammering inside. He wasn't quite sure whether it was because of the fear of getting caught or the fact that he was holding Clara, actually holding her. If he was caught, they would throw him into the deepest, darkest cell below the capital.

Just as he had hoped, the house seemed utterly deserted when he stepped inside and he didn't even dare to look in the direction of the front door where he knew two armed guards were posted to keep out intruders. They never expected them to come from the garden, which, the Doctor realized, was his luck. As he made his way up the stairs, past the President's own office, he thought he could hear the scribbling of pen on paper as he passed it, and he was glad when he finally reached Clara's room, not just because it was dangerous but also because her weight was becoming increasingly heavy on his arms.

Gently, he laid her down on her bed and took a moment to look around. Her room was large, spacious and maybe a little too romantic for his taste. The walls were white and the only thing that covered them were shelves filled with books and the Doctor laughed at the idea that the library was probably the only place on Gallifrey to hold more books than Clara's bedroom. Maybe one day he would take her there. He also spotted a desk with a bouquet of wildflowers that she had probably picked herself outside in the garden. Her bed was large and soft looking, framed by four posts and curtains and filled with more pillows than he could count. It looked comfortable and the Doctor reached out and covered her with the duvet.

Then her eyes opened and she stared at him in horror when she realized where she was. “You're in my room!” Clara blurted out, but the Doctor quickly silenced her by placing his finger on her lips.

“Shush. It's fine. You should sleep.”

“If my father catches you-”

The Doctor didn't wait for her to finish her sentence. She needed to calm down and the Doctor knew only one way to make her. In a gentle movement, he placed his hands on her temples and focused. A few seconds later, Clara sank back into the pillows, fast asleep. When she woke up tomorrow morning she would be fine except for a headache.

* * *

Her head was pounding when she woke up and for a brief moment, Clara felt disoriented. As she sat up in her bed, fighting the ache in her temples, she realized that she had no recollection of saying goodbye to the Doctor and walking upstairs. Then, slowly, the memories returned and suddenly Clara felt sick to the stomach. She couldn't even begin to comprehend what she had said to him last night and after her outburst, the Doctor must have thought she was utterly crazy. _You've made yourself essential to me._ What on Gallifrey had she been thinking? Well, one thing was for certain now. After her outburst, after telling him what was really on her mind, the Doctor would never come back to her. He wouldn't return to hang out with a crazy person.

A sudden knock on her door startled her and the noise seemed to resonate in her aching head. She swallowed hard and cleared her throat.

“Yes?”

A servant stuck her head through the crack of the open door. “Breakfast is served downstairs, Miss Clara.”

She nodded slowly even though food was the last thing she wanted right now. But how could she tell her servants that without arousing suspicion?

When the woman had retreated, Clara slowly rose from her bed and that was when her eyes fell on a little note on her bedside table. She picked it up and read it.

_Clara,_

_hope you slept well. I assume you'll have a headache, but don't worry, it'll pass soon enough. I'm sorry about last night. Eat something and drink lots of water._

_The Doctor_

He had been in her room. Clara remembered it now even though he had tried to scramble that part of her memory when he made her fall asleep with a little mind trick. The Doctor had risked getting caught just to bring her upstairs and suddenly Clara didn't know whether she should feel moved or worried. But after the note, her suspicion only seemed confirmed. The Doctor wouldn't come back, at least not anytime soon.

 

After she had changed her clothes, Clara made her way downstairs and stopped in front of her father's office when she heard voices that weren't his. Eavesdropping was a bad thing, she was fully aware of that, but she just needed to know what they were saying.

“We will not condone any of these actions,” a woman said angrily.

Then her father spoke. “If we do nothing, they will only continue to wander into our city, steal our property and hurt our people. I will not let this happen any longer.”

“What you're suggesting is genocide!” another man barked. 

“Which would rid us of the problem once and for all,” her father argued.

“The High Council's vote is unanimous,” the woman said. “And it's a no.”

Clara heard a noise that she recognized as the switching off of a communicator, following by a sound of something shattering against the wall. She knew it was a bad time, but still, Clara entered the office.

“What's going on, Father?” she wanted to know.

The Lord President spun around on his heels and Clara knew that she had caught him off guard, but his facade soon dropped and she realized she was standing in front of her concerned father, not the President any longer when his shoulders sank.

“There was a break in last night,” he explained, his voice heavy. “A group of Shobogans somehow found their way into the capital and started plundering our storage units. The guards caught them and threw them in a cell, but I know that it's only a matter of time before more are coming.”

Clara shrugged softly. “If they're just hungry, wouldn't it be better to give them the food they need? It seems that we have more than enough.”

Her father granted her a sad smile. “You sound like your mother sometimes, do you know that?”

Clara decided to take that as a compliment.

“She always urged to me press for better relations to the Shobogans, she visited them, spoke to them, but that's what got her killed, Clara. I won't allow the same thing to happen to you,” her father said. “That's why I erected the shield around the city, why I passed the law to forbid anyone from leaving the Citadel without permission. I just want to keep you safe, do you understand that?”

Clara nodded slowly. She did. She did understand it. But somehow it sounded so wrong in her ears. Ever since she had let the Doctor inside her head, everything her father did seemed wrong and there was only one way to find out what was right and what wasn't. She had to visit the Shobogans and see it with her own eyes, she had to break the law. If the Doctor ever came back. . .

“Come here,” her father said and held out his arms.

Reluctantly, Clara stepped forward until her father closed his arms around her in an embrace. He hadn't that done that in decades.

“I lost your mother, but I won't lose you,” he said softly. “I can't lose you.”

Clara nodded against his chest, but right now she wanted nothing more than to get out of the embrace. She understood what he felt because she felt the same thing – for the Doctor. She couldn't lose him.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the sweet comments! Will the Doctor really abandon Clara now? Let's find out!

It was utterly insane. Not only was he breaking into the President's garden in broad daylight, no, today he was doing something much, much worse. The Doctor knew that he couldn't walk in through the door like he had last night because the servants would be up and he wasn't entirely sure whether the President had already left for the High Council meeting, but he just needed to see Clara again. He needed to make sure that she was okay after last night. So the Doctor did the only thing he could do.

The house front wasn't as easy to climb as the garden wall and once again, the Doctor realized that he was getting a little too old for these kinds of experiments, yet the plant growing up to Clara's window provided him with an improvised ladder as he climbed up, avoiding the thought of falling all the way. That would really be an embarrassing way to regenerate.

Once the Doctor had reached her window, he took a moment to take a deep breath and for the first time, he actually looked down and suddenly started praying that Clara would let him inside. He knocked.

It took her a few seconds, but eventually, her face appeared behind the glass and she gawked at him through the window. At first, the Doctor couldn't quite place the expression on her face, but then he realized that it was one of anger.

“Are you completely mad?!” she hissed at him in a hushed voice as soon as she had opened the window. “My father is home. If he catches you here, you'll never see the light of day again!”

In reply, the Doctor only grinned at her. He had feared that after last night she would be unwell, but if her reaction was proof of anything, then that she was feeling better already. 

“Not happy to see me?” he asked.

Clara glowered at him for another moment, but eventually, she could no longer contain her excitement and a smile spread across her face.

“I didn't think I'd see you again after last night,” she replied, sounding happy as well as amazed. “At least not anytime soon.”

“Why?” The Doctor frowned at her, but suddenly, a branch broke away under his foot and he reached out to hold onto the window sill.

“Doctor!” Clara almost cried out and reached for his arms, holding onto him to prevent him from falling. “Be careful!”

The Doctor grimaced. “I'm trying,” he said, panting, his feet dangling in the air, unable to find hold. He cursed loudly. “Can you pull me inside?”

“But my father-”

There was nothing but plain, slippery wall beneath his feet and he couldn't look down to see where the branches and vines had gone. His hands were losing the grasp on the sill.

“I'd rather face him than regenerate like this,” he grunted. “Please.”

Finally, Clara grabbed his upper arms and helped pull him over the sill and into her room. The Doctor collapsed on the floor with a thud and for a moment, he wanted to do nothing but breathe and be glad that nothing had happened.

“Are you okay?”

He managed to nod before the sound of footsteps appeared outside and to his horror, the Doctor realized that they were coming closer.

“Everything alright in there, Clara?” the President's voice resounded across the hall.

Clara looked at him in horror and now even the Doctor was out of ideas. He was going to get caught. He was going to land in the deepest, darkest cell and never come out again.

“Quick! Under the bed!” she told him in a hushed voice and he didn't wait for another second before he crawled under the bed just in time before the door opened and the Lord President's feet appeared in front of his eyes.

His hearts were hammering in his chest and for a while, the Doctor was afraid that Clara's father would be able to hear them. If he was caught under Clara's bed, he would be in real trouble.

“Is everything okay?” her father asked her.

“Sure,” she replied, but the Doctor could still hear the fear in her voice. He had brought her into an impossible situation. Stupid, stupid Doctor. “I knocked over a pile of books, that's all. Just managed to put it back up.”

The seconds the President took to reply seemed like an eternity.

“Okay, sweetheart,” he said eventually and chuckled. “I'll leave you to your books.”

When the door closed behind him, the Doctor took his first breath ever since he had first heard the footsteps and slowly, he started to crawl out of his hiding place. Clara immediately reached for his arms and helped pull him up.

“You're an idiot,” she muttered when they sat down on her bed. “Just so you know.”

Not knowing what else to do, the Doctor started to laugh as he looked at her. “Oh, I know,” he replied breathlessly and for some reason, Clara started to laugh with him. But then something came to his mind, something he had almost forgotten because of the scare the Lord President had given him.

“Why did you say you didn't think I'd come back?” he asked sincerely.

A frown appeared on Clara's face, but it was quickly replaced by an expression of shame when she turned her eyes away. “Well,” she hesitated, “because of what I said to you last night. Because I started crying. I figured you'd think I was mad.”

The Doctor smiled softly and reached out to take her hand. “Last night wasn't your fault, Clara. If you're looking for someone to blame, then that's me. I should've warned you about the side effects. It makes some people very honest and quite emotional. I didn't think it would work like that on you because me and Missy. . . well, . . . I didn't think. I'm sorry.”

Clara nodded carefully, but still avoided his gaze.

“I promise you, Clara, as long as you still need me, I won't go anywhere,” he said sincerely.

Finally, she turned her head and looked at him out of her insanely large eyes. There was something about them, something the Doctor didn't quite understand. When she looked at him like that, it just tugged at his hearts. It was as if they were trying to tell him something, but his mind wasn't listening.

“I made up my mind,” Clara said after a moment. “I want to meet the Shobogans.”

“Really?” the Doctor asked in surprise. He hadn't expected her to make up her mind so soon. “Are you sure?”

Clara nodded determinedly. “Yes,” she confirmed. “You're telling me one thing and my father is telling me another. I'll never know which side to believe unless I see it with my own eyes.”

The Doctor softly squeezed her hand in his own. “You won't regret it, I promise. And nothing is going to happen to you out there, not while you're with me.”

“I trust you,” Clara replied. There was a smile on her face now. “For whatever mad reason, I trust you.”

In reply, he put on a pretend look of shock. “I'm sorry, have I given you reason not to trust me?”

Clara started to chuckle. “Mhhh, let's see. I've only known you for a few weeks.”

“Okay, good point.”

“You broke into my garden, stole an apple,” she continued.

“An even better point.”

“You told me you repeatedly break the law by sneaking out of the city. You also told me you're planning on stealing a TARDIS, all of which makes you a criminal.”

The Doctor threw her an apologetic glance. “You caught me.”

“But I trust you,” Clara reaffirmed with a nod. “And you're my friend.”

The Doctor was about to open his mouth and reply, tell her that she was his friend, too, that he was enjoying coming here to spend time with her more than he would have thought, but the words got stuck in his throat when Clara suddenly bent forward. The touch was short and gentle, their lips only met for a fraction of a second before Clara pulled away again, but it was more than enough to scramble his mind completely. For a brief second, he saw Clara in front of him and in his head at the same time, smiling at him. His lips were tingling from the kiss and his hearts were utterly out of control. There was nothing he could say to her in return, his mind was blank.

“You should probably leave,” Clara told him softly. “Before my father comes back.”

The Doctor nodded, still unable to say a single word. Whatever had happened, it was something new and familiar at the same time and it was confusing him. Time Lords didn't kiss like that, but when had the Doctor ever played by the rules?


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so, so much for the lovely comments! Here, let me give you a *cyber hug*

Clara uttered a loud and terrified scream as the phantom appeared in front of her and the Doctor instantly came to her aid. She reached out and grabbed his arm, but soon realized that the ghost wasn't attacking.

“Don't worry, they can't harm you,” the Doctor reassured her in a calm, low voice. “It's just a data ghost.”

“Rassilon's rod!” she cursed, still completely out of breath from the scare. “It looks terrifying!”

The Doctor's head shot around and he gawked at her in shock. “Clara! Language!”

“What?” Clara frowned at him. “You can curse but I can't?”

To her surprise, he chuckled in response. “Well, I wouldn't necessarily use that particular curse in front of the Shobogans. To them, _rod_ means something completely different.”

“What does it mean?” she wanted to know. They were on their way to the Shobogans right now, so she was curious what kind of culture she was going to find and she thought it wise to learn as much as she could before they arrived.

“Oh, nothing. Not important,” the Doctor mumbled and turned around, resuming his stride through the Cloisters.

It was an eerie place and if it hadn't been for the Doctor, Clara wouldn't even have set a single foot inside. She was aware that she was currently walking through one of the oldest ruins on the entire planet, but that didn't keep her from noticing just how red the Doctor had suddenly gone as he had avoided answering her question. Quickly, Clara jumped forward to catch up with him.

“What does _rod_ mean to the Shobogans?” she asked again and looked straight at him as they walked. She could see how uncomfortable he was with the subject, but Clara wasn't so easily deterred. “Come on, tell me. You don't want me to accidentally say something bad, do you?”

The Doctor glanced away, avoiding her gaze.

“Doctor,” she begged, giving him a soft nudge and chuckling. “Tell me.”

He cleared his throat in reply. “It's, uhm, it's a word for a body part, a word you shouldn't use.”

“What body part?”

In reply, the Doctor groaned. “It's the word for a male private part, okay? Please, don't say it in front of the Shobogans.”

His response made Clara giggle. With her tutor, she had covered the physiology of Time Lords and that had included the differences between a man and a woman. She had been curious about it even then, but her tutor had reacted the same way the Doctor was reacting right now – by blushing mercilessly. She hadn't been able to get a single word out of the embarrassed, spluttering young man.

“You remind me of my tutor sometimes, you know that?” Clara said, chuckling while she followed the Doctor on his heels. “He always blushed at the mere mention of body parts.”

There was a light coming from the end of the tunnel and it illuminated the Doctor's face just enough for her to see him go bright red once again.

“Yep, just like that,” she giggled.

The Doctor growled at her in reply. She was about to say something witty in response when he pointed ahead, straight at the light.

“There's the exit,” he explained and turned around, smiling at her. “You're about to leave the Citadel for the first time in your life. Ready?”

Clara chuckled nervously. “Yes,” she replied, but then changed her mind. “No. Yes. I think I am.”

The Doctor held out his hand and Clara took it reluctantly, feeling him squeeze her hand in his in a reassuring gesture. Together, they stepped outside.

Clara thought she had known what taking a breath felt like, after all, she had done it all her life, but this felt different and so much better. They were standing at the foot of the mountain, overlooking an endless field of red grass that shone in the evening sunlight and Clara spotted all sorts of flowers and plants she hadn't even seen in her books. All those paintings, all those descriptions hadn't been able to convey just how beautiful Gallifrey truly was with its fields and mountains tinged in an orange glow, the twin suns on one side and the moons on the other where the sky had already started to turn purple. Even breathing felt different out here. The air was so clean, so untainted without the pollution of the Time Lords' machines.

“In a few hours you'll see more stars than you have ever seen,” the Doctor promised her.

Again, Clara took a deep breath, smelling the cleanliness of the air and the wildflowers. It was magnificent. “I love it,” she whispered as if her voice could disturb the peace of the moment.

The Doctor suddenly held out his hand again and even though Clara wasn't quite sure what he was up to, she took it and then was immediately dragged towards the field. They were running. Clara couldn't remember the last time she had run and she was out of breath in a matter of seconds, but it was absolutely worth it. Their feet rushing forward, the wind blowing her hair in all directions. Clara had never felt so free in her entire life and she found herself laughing despite the lack of air.

All of a sudden, her feet got tangled in the weeds and she would have caught her balance under normal circumstances, but she was too fast and instantly, she felt her body fall forwards, but somehow the Doctor was in her way and instead of falling to the ground, Clara landed right on top of him.

Once the shock of the moment had settled, both of them started laughing at the same time.

“Are you hurt?” the Doctor wanted to know and for some reason, his hands were still holding onto her waist. Clara didn't feel like complaining about that.

“No, I'm fine,” she panted and then laughed again. “You're a practical cushion.”

“A what? A cushion?” the Doctor growled, trying his best to sound affronted, but she could tell that he was secretly amused.

She giggled once again, but suddenly the Doctor used his arms around her waist to flip them both over and he didn't stop until Clara was flat on her back and he was lying on top of her.

“Who's the cushion now?” he asked, a broad smile on his face. Clara wanted to kiss him right now and she had no idea where the urge was coming from. There was something exciting about the way their bodies touched, something completely foreign about the tingling sensation that spread across her skin and a part of her wanted to explore it further. But what she wanted even more was to win this fight.

Clara used all the strength that she had, hooked her leg around him and turned the Doctor on his back again, laughing as she did. He finally seemed to have given up the struggle and as the laughter slowly died down, Clara found herself smiling at him. What would he do if she kissed him, properly kissed him? Clara knew that it wasn't something Time Lords usually did, but she had done it once before, she had kissed her tutor and she had liked it and something told her that she was going to like kissing the Doctor even more. How would he react? Would he like it, too? Would he helplessly wave his arms around? Would he push her away?

Just as Clara had determined she would just have to find out, a noise startled her and she looked up. Immediately, she distanced herself from the Doctor and pointed at the small boy who had appeared right next to him.

“Doctor,” she said and nodded towards the child while he was still scrambling back into a sitting position.

A smile spread across his face. “Aeden,” the Doctor greeted the boy happily. “Can't sneak up on you, can I?”

Yet the boy's wary gaze was fixed on Clara as if he was afraid she was going to hurt him. Somehow, Clara felt even smaller than the child.

“It's okay,” the Doctor told him. “Clara is a friend and we've brought you a little something.”

He reached into his bag and pulled out a biscuit, handing it to Aeden. His small face instantly lit up.

“Don't tell the others,” he said to the boy in a hushed voice.

Aeden nodded, finally smiling at the two of them before he suddenly turned around and dashed across the field. In the distance, Clara could already see their camp.

“Are you ready?” the Doctor asked her.

Clara turned her head, beaming at him. “Yes.”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the sweet, sweet comments, guys!!! I'm so happy that you're enjoying this and, yes, you only have Jenna's photoshoot to thank for this idea XD Now, let's see what Clara might learn from the Shobogans. . .

Clara had only been at the Shobogan camp for a few hours, but she already knew that everything the Doctor had told her was the truth. They weren't violent or evil or savage and in a way, this place felt more like a home to her than her father's mansion ever had. The tribe welcomed them with open arms and treated her not like a stranger, but as if they had known her for decades. They lit a fire, Clara was offered a seat, a plate of food and a glass containing something she instantly identified as the drink the Doctor had already introduced her to. To them, their appearance seemed to be the most ordinary thing while Clara couldn't stop marvelling over every little thing she saw.

It was true, the Shobogans were different from the Time Lords, they didn't live in stone and metal houses, they didn't wear the customary robes, but Clara found the differences more pleasant than anything else. Somehow, the Shobogans seemed happier out here than the Time Lords she had seen within the Citadel. They treated the Doctor like some sort of God, like a hero, especially the children that were swarming around him, eager to hear a story or get another biscuit from him. Clara smiled at the sight in front of her eyes when she realized how much they adored him because that was a sentiment she could understand completely.

“Eat, girl,” a woman said as she sank down in the seat next to Clara.

Clara looked up and recognized her as the mother of the boy that had found them in the field earlier. Shobogans didn't regenerate, so Clara assumed that she was, in fact, older than the Shobogan woman who called her a _girl_ , but she couldn't know for sure. There was a wisdom in the woman's eyes that the others of her tribe didn't seem to possess.

“I'm not quite sure what this is,” she admitted sheepishly and nodded towards the food on her plate.

“It's pig,” the woman explained. “The Doctor and his other friend aren't so fond of the animals we usually hunt. I'm Malaya, by the way.”

“Clara,” she replied with a smile and, finally knowing exactly what kind of meat she was about to eat, lifted a piece to her mouth to chewed it. “Mhhh, this tastes good.”

“Well, I should hope so. I prepared it myself,” the woman responded.

Clara let her gaze wander once more. The Doctor had told her repeatedly about how bad things were for the Shobogans, about how they were starving, but they seemed nothing but happy.

“They're happy because we're having a feast,” Malaya explained as if she had read her thoughts. “We do this every time the Doctor comes to visit. He always brings us food, like this pig. They love him for that, especially the children.”

“Wait,” Clara cut her off, frowning at the woman. “He brought this pig here? How? I came with him and I didn't see him carry a pig.”

Malaya chuckled. “Time Lord science. His bag is bigger on the inside.”

“Oh,” she uttered, somehow feeling like she should have known. “I'm a Time Lady and I don't even know much about my own people. I didn't get out very often until I met the Doctor.”

The Shobogan woman smiled knowingly. “Time Lord society can be very constricting, but I can promise you that the Doctor is the best man you will ever meet. He's different from the others. He's kind.”

Clara nodded until the realization struck her. “You're the woman that helped him after he regenerated, aren't you?”

Suddenly, Malaya glanced away and her entire posture seemed to have changed. “I don't know what you're talking about,” she said, but it was an obvious lie.

“He told me there was a woman who found him after his regeneration, he said she knew a lot about the Time Lords. It was you, wasn't it?”

When Malaya looked at her again, it was as if she had put on a mask through which she smiled at Clara. “Don't be silly. That was a long time ago and you know that Shobogans don't live that long. That woman would be ancient by now.”

Clara was about to open her mouth and protest because she knew that there was something Malaya was hiding from her, but she never got the chance.

“Try your mead,” the woman told her.

“Oh, uhm,” she hesitated, remembering all too well what had happened last time she had tried the Shobogan alcohol. “I'm not sure I like it very much.”

“It's not the same kind I gave to the Doctor,” Malaya reassured her. “Go on, it's good.”

Reluctantly, Clara lifted the glass to her mouth and took a sip and she realized instantly that Malaya had told her the truth. There was still a hint of bitterness in the drink, but she could also taste honey and a mixture of herbs. She liked it.

The sound of screaming startled Clara and tore her out of her thoughts, but when she looked up, she soon noticed that it was only the children fighting each other with wooden swords. Aeden appeared to be winning.

“He's your boy, isn't he?” Clara asked curiously. “But I haven't seen his father around.”

A sad smile appeared on the woman's face. “His father sits in a cell beneath the Citadel. His mother died when she gave birth to him,” Malaya explained. “I can't have children of my own, but I can take care of those who lost their parents.”

Clara finished her drink, not really knowing what to reply to Malaya. The Shobogan life was so different from what she had expected and in many ways it seemed easier than that of the Time Lords, but she had already realized that they didn't pose any kind of threat to the Time Lords in the Citadel. It was the other way around. It was the Time Lords that were starving them, keeping them prisoner, looking them out. Among her own people, everyone had to fight for themselves, out here they seemed to be one big family.

“You like the mead, don't you?” Malaya suddenly asked and the smile had returned to her face. “Let me get you a refill.”

“Oh, no,” Clara tried to stop the woman, but it was already too late. Malaya had refilled her glass. “Last time I tried it, that didn't go so well.”

“Don't worry, you're a Time Lady, the effects will have worn off in no time. Just takes a bit of getting used to,” the woman explained.

Clara granted her a sheepish smile and sipped her drink, her eyes wandering over to the Doctor again. He was telling the children and the adults who were listening a fantastic tale about the time he and Missy had ventured into the Cloisters and found a live troll. She couldn't quite say whether it was made up or whether it had truly happened because the Doctor didn't present himself as the hero in this tale. Instead, he had been captured by the troll and had needed Missy's aid to be freed again before they had both decided to help the lost troll find his way back into the mountains.

But as he moved on to the next story, Clara realized that she found it difficult to actually follow his words while her head was feeling a little foggy. She put her glass aside and rose to her feet, struggling to keep her balance and Malaya came to her aid in an instant.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Clara nodded. “Yeah,” she replied. “I just need a bit of fresh air. I think I'm gonna go for a walk.”

Luckily, no one attempted to stop her as she walked away from their camp and Clara prayed that she would be able to find her way back later because she had no idea where she was going. She only knew that she needed to walk despite feeling like the ground was wobbling beneath her feet. After breathing in deeply and smelling the sweet air, the spinning in her head subsided a little.

As she looked up to the sky, Clara noticed one more thing the Doctor hadn't lied about. Out here, away from the city, away from the light of the fire, the stars seemed a lot brighter and she watched them sparkle above her head like a million diamonds. It was a calming sight and for a brief moment, Clara considered just sitting down and staring up at the stars until the Doctor came to find her.

Then a noise caught her attention and Clara frowned in the direction from which it was coming. It was a strange sound, unlike any she had ever heard before, and for a brief moment she considered running back to find the Doctor, but then she realized that it wasn't an animal, but a person. With her curiosity sparked, she stepped forward and followed the sound on her unsteady feet and the closer she came, the better she was able to identify it. It was panting mixed with a few moans and Clara sped up her steps, thinking that maybe someone was hurt and in need of help, when she suddenly saw them. Clara stopped.

Two people were lying in the grass, barely visible under the light of the moons, and the sounds were coming from them. Clara noticed that the woman was lying underneath the man, writhing under his movements, and she suddenly cried out as if in pain. Only she didn't really seem in pain at all and she made no attempt to stop what the man was doing to her. Quite the contrary. She seemed to _enjoy_ it. A strange feeling suddenly came over her, one Clara had never really felt before. It was curiosity mixed with something else, something new entirely, almost like an urge, like a tingling in her abdomen that she couldn't quite explain. Then she felt the touch of a hand on her shoulder and almost shrieked in surprise.

“Shhh,” Malaya hushed her in a low, barely audible voice. “Let's give them some privacy, shall we?”

Clara nodded and let the woman lead her back towards the camp while she realized that she had walked a lot further than she had suspected. Slowly, her head was beginning to clear a little, but she could still feel the alcohol in her veins, making her feel just a little giddy, a little funny.

“What were they doing?” Clara found herself asking when they were out of earshot.

To her surprise, Malaya laughed in response. “They were having sex,” she explained, the amusement over Clara's ignorance all too audible in her voice.

“Oh,” she uttered when she realized what she had just witnessed. Clara had read about it in books even though none of them had really described the process at all. They had only told her that it was the way animals procreated, though the Time Lords had lost the ability to reproduce like that a very long time ago and the looms had since then become the primary way to ensure the endurance of their people. But now, Clara was curious. “Are they trying to have a baby?”

Again, the woman laughed and it was beginning to madden her. It wasn't Clara's fault that she had grown up in a society that didn't need sex to reproduce and she was tired of being treated like a child over every little thing that she learned.

“Don't laugh at me, just tell me,” she demanded.

Malaya stopped, but the amusement was still visible on her features as she looked at Clara. “They have sex because it's fun,” she explained. “Yes, that's how babies are made, but it's also a very pleasant activity.”

The woman's smile turned into a grin and this time Clara knew that it had nothing to do with her, but with the topic they were discussing. The Shobogans really enjoyed it for some reason.

“How does it work?” she asked. Clara wanted to know now, she wanted to know what the enjoyable part of it was. “How does it feel?”

Again, the woman started to laugh, but before Clara could protest, she started telling her the details Clara had been eager to hear. It seemed strange, but the way Malaya was telling her about it, left Clara with no doubt that there had to be something about the process that made it enjoyable even though, just from hearing about it, it was kind of hard to believe.

“Why hasn't the Doctor told me about this?” Clara wanted to know. “He told me a lot about the Shobogans, but not about this.”

Malaya laughed again as she placed her hand on Clara's shoulder. They had almost arrived back at the camp. “Because he's just a Time Lord. To them, it's something dirty, something only animals do,” she said with a shrug. “With the looms, they no longer have need for it and I guess that some millennia ago, they just stopped doing it.”

Clara looked at her, nodding. Her explanation made sense.

Then the woman chuckled and her voice dropped to a whisper while they joined the other Shobogans at the fire. “But if you want to make him blush like crazy, you can mention it.”

Clara giggled in response.

“Now, come on, let's sit and have another drink,” Malaya prompted her.

With a smile, Clara sank back down in her seat and while the Shobogan woman refilled her glass, she glanced at the Doctor who was smiling at her in return. He had been right all along. Apart from him, the Shobogans were the nicest people she had ever met.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the lovely comments :) Will Clara get curious? What's up with Malaya? Maybe you'll find out?

Clara held onto his arm as they made they way back and no matter what he tried, the Doctor couldn't get her to let go. Not that he really wanted her to, but her touch still confused him a little. He told himself that it was natural, that she had spent her entire life in isolation and was looking for a hand to hold. Most of the time, the Doctor felt the same, but tonight he found her touch a little more confusing than reassuring.

Clara had fallen silent a while ago and the Doctor wished he could know what was going on in her head, but the soft smile on her lips told him it was probably something nice.

“A Pandak for your thoughts,” he said and watched as her smile widened. “What's your verdict?”

“What? On the Shobogans?”

The Doctor nodded. She had been gone from the fire for a while and later returned with Malaya. He had no idea what had happened.

“You were right,” Clara admitted with a sigh. “I think they are wonderful people, interesting people. I think the Time Lords are treating them unjustly, but I don't have a solution. I thought that maybe if I saw them, I'd know what to do, what to make better, but I don't. Opening our gates to them, including them into our world won't work. I don't think the Shobogans would want that. They wouldn't wanna be like the Time Lords.”

“No, they wouldn't,” the Doctor admitted regretfully. He had considered that option, but he knew that Clara was speaking the truth. The Shobogans wouldn't want to live like that. They wouldn't like the concept of work or money even if it was a way for them to survive. They would stop being who they are, hunters, gatherers and farmers.

“Asking the Time Lords to give them food won't work either, the High Council would never approve and in the meantime, they're just gonna expand their fields and take from the little the Shobogans have,” Clara reasoned. “The farmland the Shobogans have left isn't gonna be enough. They're too many. Malaya told me they're just one tribe of several, all consisting of more people. Without Time Lord inventions, the soil would be barren at some point and there won't be enough for them to hunt.”

“You're a smart woman, Clara,” the Doctor realized. And she would be after spending her entire life reading.

“I think the only way for them to survive is beyond the desert, on the other side of the planet,” she said determinedly. “Far away from the Citadel and Arcadia.”

“You know what's in the desert, don't you?”

Clara nodded and turned her head, looking at him. “What if we found a way to get them there?”

The Doctor chuckled. If only that was possible. “Like what?”

“I don't know,” she replied. “But I'm afraid for them. My father is planning something. I overheard a conversation with the High Council and they vetoed one of his suggestions. They were talking about genocide.”

“The High Council wouldn't allow that,” the Doctor said immediately. He just couldn't imagine that they would do such a thing.

“And my father won't give up, trust me. He'll find a way to get rid of them, one way or another.”

The Doctor sighed heavily and now it was his turn to reach for Clara's hand, holding it in his own as they walked through the fields that were now grey in the moonlight instead of red. He was tired. He didn't want to talk about the Shobogans' situation any longer because no matter how hard they tried, they wouldn't find a solution, not tonight. Then he suddenly remembered something and he reached for his bag to let Clara have a glimpse inside.

“You nicked a bottle of the mead?” she gasped.

“No, I asked,” the Doctor insisted as he slid it back inside his bag. “You seemed to like it. It'll go nicely with some Murdis at our next picnic.”

Still, Clara frowned at him. “I can't imagine Malaya just gave it to you. She was very proud of it and she said she only made a few bottles.”

The Doctor cleared his throat. “Well, I said I asked. I never said she agreed.”

“Stealing from the poor, Doctor, that's naughty,” she scolded him playfully, but the Doctor was sure that the worst Malaya would do would probably be a smack across the head.

“In case you forgot, I brought them an entire pig, some vegetables and biscuits for the children,” he argued.

“Let me guess, all of which were stolen?”

The guilty look on his face gave him away before he could even say a word, but somehow it only made Clara laugh. Then, after a few moments had passed, her face again took on a more thoughtful expression.

“You never said where you went during the feast,” the Doctor noted.

“Oh, uhm, just. . . just for a walk,” she replied, but the way she avoided his gaze made the Doctor wary.

“And then you returned with Malaya and both of you were giggling like schoolchildren.”

Clara chuckled in reply, but never said a word and for some reason, it was beginning to bug him a little. He hated not being part of a joke and he hated it even more when Clara knew something he didn't.

“What were you talking about?” he wanted to know.

“Nothing,” Clara said, giggling. “Just. . . stuff. Shobogan stuff.”

He growled when she refused to tell him and suddenly, Clara squinted her eyes at him. 

“Are you jealous?” she wanted to know.

The Doctor scoffed.

“Cause you're acting like it,” she insisted. “You're acting a little jealous cause I spent some time on my own and you hate the idea that I may have learned a thing or two and you weren't the one to teach me.”

Clara wasn't entirely wrong, but the Doctor knew that he would never admit to that. If he did, Clara would never shut up about it. So he merely huffed in reply. “Don't be silly, Clara.”

“You're not all-knowing, you know? Cause I did learn something,” Clara chuckled. She was teasing him now and he really shouldn't give in to that, but he was too curious to know what had happened away from the fire, especially because Clara didn't seem very eager to share it. Knowing the Shobogans, it could be all sorts of things. He had to find out.

“Well, enlighten me then,” the Doctor challenged her. “Cause I can promise you, whatever you've seen, I saw it first.”

Now Clara truly burst into laughter. “Oh, I sincerely doubt that,” she said, still giggling.

The smirk on her face told him she was enjoying this immensely. For once, for the first time since they had met, Clara had the upper hand and she was enjoying it. The Doctor vowed not to let that feeling last because he would find out.

“Tell me,” he prompted her in a growling tone, but Clara only smiled and shook her head.

“Not gonna happen.”

“Tell me!”

“Make me!”

While the Doctor was still busy thinking of a way to make her tell him, Clara suddenly approached him and before he knew what was happening, her hands were on his cheeks, pulling him down until their lips met. She had kissed him before, so it shouldn't have surprised him, but it did and what surprised him even more was that this time, Clara didn't pull away. He didn't know what to do, he didn't know what he should do because he somehow liked it. Clara's lips were soft and he uttered a small sound of surprise when she parted them for him and as if by instinct, the Doctor did the same. He could still taste the sweet honey of the mead on her tongue when she slipped it into his mouth and the Doctor couldn't even say where she had gotten that idea from, but it was definitely a good one. When finally the shock of the impact subsided a little, the Doctor closed his arms around her waist and pulled her closer. He didn't want to break the kiss, he didn't want to stop. There was something so sweet and enticing about the way she kissed him that it made him want more and the feeling seemed to shoot straight through his body.

For a moment, the Doctor thought he was going to regenerate. Something tugged at his belly, his entire skin seemed electrified and there was this urge to pull her closer even though their bodies were already touching, but it still wasn't enough. If there had been a way, the Doctor would have wanted to be within her.

Eventually, the lack of air forced them apart and Clara broke away, panting and smiling. The Doctor was utterly lost. He couldn't even say a word.

“Rassilon's ghost, I love this,” she said, giggling.

The Doctor swallowed, but still, he couldn't find the words to say what he was truly thinking. What was he even thinking? The only thing he was sure of right now was that he had never felt anything like this before.

“So, uhm,” he spluttered eventually. “Are you gonna tell me what . . uh. . . what happened during the feast?”

Clara granted him a smile, but she never said a word when she took his hand and started leading him towards the entrance to the Cloisters. The Doctor's mind was a mess and he thought he would probably never find out what Clara had seen or what had compelled her to kiss him like that.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *big cyber hug for my faithful readers* Thank you so much for your sweet comments!

Clara giggled when he led her into the library, his hands firmly on both of her arms as she took one small step after another. The Doctor wanted it to be a surprise, so he had covered her eyes with a blindfold before they had entered the building. Even though she couldn't even see where they were going, her excitement about a new adventure was obvious.

“When can I take these off?” she asked him impatiently, but they hadn't reached the perfect spot yet. The Doctor wanted to lead her to the centre of the room from where she would be able to overlook all of the shelves.

“In a moment,” he said in a hushed voice. “Almost there. No peeking!”

“Is that an echo?”

The Doctor quickly cleared his throat. “No. How did you get that idea?” he mumbled to prevent his voice from resounding in the large hall.

Finally, they had reached the centre and the Doctor stopped, but still held onto her arms to keep Clara from wandering off. His hearts were beating a little faster and he felt almost as excited as Clara when he raised his hands to her blindfold to undo the knot. She was going to love it, wasn't she? Suddenly the Doctor wasn't so sure anymore. Her father was the Lord President of Gallifrey and he could probably get her any book she wanted. Maybe this had been a stupid idea, but it was too late to reconsider now. The blindfold came off.

Clara gasped once her eyes had adjusted to the light and she stepped forward, out of his reach and turned around on the spot, taking in the sight in front of her while the Doctor tried his best to hide the smile on his face. She loved it, he was sure of that.

“This is where you work?” Clara asked, but still, her eyes were fixed on the countless books around her, not him.

“I work in the back mostly, which is where Stonix has his workshop, but yeah,” he explained, not without a hint of pride. “Do you like it?”

“I've never seen so many books in my entire life,” she replied. “My father has a huge library, but it's nothing compared to this.”

While Clara was still admiring the books, the Doctor stepped into her field of vision and grinned at her. “On these shelves are all the books that have ever been written on Gallifrey,” he said proudly. “And countless books written on other planets from all over the universe.”

“Other planets?” Clara gawked at him.

His grin only widened. “Curious?”

She laughed. “You bet!”

The Doctor grabbed her hand and Clara only uttered a sound of surprise before he dragged her off to his favourite corner of the library. It was far in the back, hidden behind the shelf filled with books about Gallifrey's fauna because no one but him was really interested in the topic, but to the Doctor, these books in particular were a treasure. He trailed his hand over the leather-bound spines and drew out one book that he loved in particular before he handed it to Clara.

She gave him a curious look. “Where's it from?”

“Earth,” the Doctor said proudly. “Their literature is the best in the entire universe. Shakespeare, Austen, Rowling. This one's called _Macbeth_.”

A tiny frown appeared on Clara's face and for some reason, she looked at him and not the book, but the Doctor was too excited to pay any real attention to it.

“That's the first place I'll go when I steal a TARDIS. I'll go to Earth. I'll visit Shakespeare just to see what he's like,” he told her.

He watched Clara swallow and somehow the excitement seemed to have left her. The Doctor realized in an instant that he had messed up again, that he had hurt her without meaning to. Clara was still scared he was going to leave her despite his promise, despite that being the last thing he wanted. The only thing he could do now was to try and cheer her up.

“What do you say? Do you wanna read it?”

“Uhm, I already have,” she responded reluctantly and her gaze dropped to the book in her hands. “I. . . I wasn't aware it came from another planet.”

Now it was the Doctor's turn to frown at her. “You've read it?” he asked in surprise. “I didn't know the President keeps Earth literature in his library.”

Clara didn't reply immediately. Instead, she opened the book at the first page and caressed the paper and right now she seemed so lost in thought that the Doctor was too afraid to speak. There was something about the book that disturbed her and he had no idea what that could be.

“He doesn't,” Clara said eventually, absent-mindedly. Then she slammed the book shut and looked at him. “My tutor gave it to me to read. He said it was his favourite.”

The Doctor growled internally and felt a sudden stab of jealousy as the long forgotten tutor had once again beaten him to something that man couldn't even remember. 

“Well, let's not dwell on that then,” the Doctor said gruffly and took the book from her before he stuffed it back onto the shelf. Quickly, his eyes scanned the row of books for something even more impressive.

“Doctor, is this your first face? Your first regeneration?” Clara asked cautiously.

“What about Sherlock Holmes, have you read that?” he asked. “Or Chaucer? Have you read Chaucer, Clara?”

“Doctor, answer my question.”

With a sigh, he stopped his search and turned to look at Clara who only stared at him with her impossible eyes. “No, Clara, this isn't my first face. I regenerated before the Shobogan woman found me, remember? But I don't want to revisit that face because it was a really silly one.”

To his surprise, Clara chuckled. “How silly?”

The Doctor knitted his eyebrows at her in response, but Clara never went on to elaborate. Instead, she suddenly dashed past him and down the corridor, down the stairs until she had reached the centre of the library.

“Clara?” The Doctor asked, only now finding the voice to speak again. “Is something wrong?”

“Time Lord Fairy Tales,” she replied breathlessly, turning around on the spot, unsure of which route she should take. “Where are they?”

“Uhm,” he spluttered.

“Where are the fairy tales?” Clara demanded to know.

He had no choice. Clara had obviously gone insane, so the Doctor did the only thing he could do and pointed towards the right shelf. He watched in confusion as Clara darted forward, looked and eventually pulled a volume from the shelf.

“Doctor!” she called out and when he looked, the book already came flying at him. The Doctor caught it at the last moment.

“Clara, what's the-”

“Read me my favourite!” she demanded while she came running back to him.

“Clara, I really think you should calm down,” he replied softly. “Something seems-”

“Read it, Doctor,” Clara prompted him as she came to a halt right in front of the Doctor and granted him a smile. Suddenly, she didn't seem so mad anymore. “Read me my favourite, please.”

“Uhm,” the Doctor paused. “I don't know what your favourite is.”

The smile on her face widened. “Guess.”

With nothing else left to do, the Doctor opened the book and glanced at the index. _Helena And The Beast_? Probably not. _The Grief Collector_? Unlikely. _The Garden Of Statues_?  
The Doctor glanced up and saw the excitement on her face, but there was something else. There was a look of admiration, of. . . fondness. Clara was fond of him and suddenly, the Doctor was terrified that he was going to disappoint her. He opened the page and cleared his throat.

“Uhm, _The Garden of Statues_ -”

He didn't even get past the title when Clara stepped forward, closed the distance between the two of them and took the book out of his hands. The Doctor could do nothing but watch as she placed it aside and went on to cup his face in her hands. His mouth felt a little dry. Was she going to kiss him again? A part of him hoped that she would even though the closeness was still a little scary. He had no clue what was going on. Had he messed up again? Had he made her happy?

“Thank you,” she said sincerely.

The Doctor opened his mouth and was about to ask when Clara cut him off again.

“I love you, Doctor,” Clara confessed and went up on her toes to kiss him.

She might have gone mad, but nevertheless, the Doctor loved her, too.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your lovely comments! Bad news for you: I'll spend the weekend at a DW con and I'm not entirely sure whether I'll have internet at the apartment that I rented and even if, I think I'll be dead tired after the con and won't be able to post the next chapter until Monday. If you get bored in the meantime, why don't you read from the start and look for clues? XD

Clara was sure, well, reasonably sure. It was a good theory, more than just a hunch, but she still wanted at least some kind of evidence before she just sprang her idea on the Doctor. What if it was just wishful thinking? What if she was only hoping that her tutor, now regenerated into an older body, had found his way back to her? Clara had dreamed about it for decades, hoped, prayed that her tutor would somehow remember and find her again. In her loneliest moments, she had pictured him, rescuing her from her dreary existence. And then the Doctor had shown up and done exactly that.

He looked different, completely different, but that wasn't unusual for a Time Lord. There were other similarities to make up for that. Macbeth, her favourite fairy tale. It could have been a lucky guess, so Clara really wasn't certain right now. What if it was all just in her mind? Clara had to know for sure.

She knocked on her father's office door and stepped inside while he was just gathering up his papers for the next High Council meeting.

“Clara,” he said and greeted her with a smile. “I'm sorry, darling, I don't have much time right now.”

“It's okay,” she replied breathlessly. “I just have one question.”

“Alright.” Her father stopped and stood up straight to look at her. “What do you want to ask me?”

Clara inhaled deeply, only now noticing how nervous she really was. This could go smoothly or it could end in a fight. She had no idea because the last time she had brought up her tutor was nothing but a faint memory in her head now. It had been so long.

“I wanted to ask you what became of my tutor,” she blurted out, hoping her voice wasn't too shaky. Her father would have it easier if he knew how frightened she really was.

His gaze darkened instantly.

“I told you to forget about him,” the Lord President growled in reply. “Because he certainly has forgotten all about you.”

“Then you should have erased my memory and not his!” she spat, but quickly softened her tone again. “Please, Father, I just want to know if he's well.”

“Whether he's well or not is no concern of yours!” he barked at her, his sharp voice cutting through the air. “I should have thrown him into the deepest, darkest cell on Gallifrey for what he tried to do to you! And I left you with your memories so you would understand how important it is that you stay in this house until I give you permission to leave!”

“The one thing has nothing to do with the other!”

“Yes, it does!” he argued loudly. “Your tutor was a danger to you and you shouldn't care if he's well or not! You should forget about him!”

“Father-”

“End of discussion!” he shouted and Clara was silenced immediately, knowing that she would never get any kind of information from him. Instead, she watched him pick up his papers. When he spoke again, his voice was that of her caring father and not that of the Lord President. “I'm going to leave for the council meeting. Please, for your own sake and safety, forget about him.”

“Will you at least tell me if he's still alive?” she asked as he walked past her.

Her father came to a halt in the doorway. “It doesn't matter,” he replied and walked out of the room.

 

Clara inhaled deeply when he was gone, but even though her father hadn't told her anything, she had still learned more than she would have expected. Her tutor was still alive and he was still on Gallifrey, not in a cell, but out there somewhere. If he was dead, her father would have told her just to shut her up, but he wasn't. There was still hope. And there was still a chance that he and the Doctor were the same person.

When Clara was sure that he had left the house, she walked over to what looked like a cupboard to any other person and opened the door, revealing her father's safe. It was locked to his genetic code so only he could open it, but Clara shared at least part of his DNA, didn't she? Maybe it would be enough. 

She placed her thumb on the little spot designed in the shape of a lock and suddenly jerked back when a needle sprang out and stung her.

“Ow,” she cursed and shook out her hand, but the monitor in front of her had already come to life.

_Processing genetic data_

“Come on,” Clara muttered under a breath as she watched the percentage on the screen grow higher and higher.

_Processing genetic data_  
_30%_

“Please,” she begged quietly, but then the screen went red.

_No genetic match_

The words blinked bright red in front of her as if to taunt her and Clara was about to sigh and give up when the screen changed colour again.

_Recalculating. Processing genetic data_

“I'm his daughter,” Clara said to herself. “That should be at least 50%. And Time Lords change with every regeneration, there should be some leeway.”

Then, to her surprise, the lock clicked.

_Genetic match found_

The door sprung open, revealing everything her father had hidden away, but to her disappointed, Clara spotted only a few items in the safe. Without waiting any longer, she instantly reached for the neural block, the one he had used to wipe her tutor's memory, and slid it into her pocket. Then her eyes fell on something else, something far more personal than a neural block. A stack of letters in a feminine handwriting, addressed to her father's first name.

“Miss Clara?!”

At the sound of her maid's voice, Clara quickly closed the safe and distance herself from the cupboard. She could come back anytime she liked, but for now, she had what she had come for.

* * *

The Doctor locked the library and smiled to himself at the prospect of a quiet, cosy night. He had his bag that contained the mead and some Murdis and he would visit Clara for a picnic in her forest. There were so many things he wanted to tell her about, including the meteor shower they had announced for the following week. The Doctor wanted to watch it with her and maybe he wanted to kiss her again, too. He wasn't sure about that yet. But his hearts were beating faster as his excitement grew and he turned out, only to find a not quite so pleasant surprise.

“Missy,” he blurted out. “Hi, uhm, bad timing. Tomorrow, yeah? Tomorrow's better.”

“You can save your breath,” she replied, crossing her arms in front of her chest. There was a hint of anger in her voice and on her face and the Doctor wasn't quite sure what he had done to deserve that.

“You don't have time tomorrow? Is that what you're saying?” he asked carefully.

“You've been neglecting me these past few weeks,” Missy began. “I mean, I don't really mind, we all have our busy, busy lives. But I got a little bored last night and I went out to the Shobogans on my own.”

“Oh,” he uttered in response, already knowing where this was going to lead.

“Turns out they're only friendly when I'm with you for whatever reason,” she went on, rolling her eyes. “But they did tell me something quite interesting.”

The Doctor blew the air out between his teeth, hoping that she would cut to the chase soon so he could tell her that it was none of her busy and be done with it.

“They told me you went to see them a few days ago, told me you all had a great feast together,” she went on. “You and the girl you brought.”

The Doctor forced a smile in reply.

“Who is she? Who have you been seeing?”

“It doesn't matter,” the Doctor replied.

He howled when Missy whacked him across the back of the head. “ _It doesn't matter?_ We're supposed to be best pals, you and me, Theta and Koschei, not you and some girl you picked up on the street. Don't get me wrong, I'm not territorial or anything, but I'd like to know about your new best friend, you know, as your old best friend.”

The Doctor rubbed the back of his head where she had hit him. “It's just another Time Lady, Missy. She doesn't have a lot of friends, she was lonely.”

“So you bring her to our secret places?” she half yelled at him. “I'm starting to get the feeling that you're trying to replace me.”

“I'm not trying to replace you!” the Doctor argued. “I should have told you about her earlier.”

It was a lie, a fat, blatant lie. The Doctor would have never, under any circumstances, told Missy about Clara. 

“Well, you can tell me now. I'm all ears,” she said, eyeing him expectantly.

The Doctor inhaled deeply and considered his options. Missy wouldn't allow him to leave her with nothing, but he could never mention that Clara was the Lord President's daughter and that he was sneaking into his garden to steal her on a regular basis. “Her name is Clara,” he replied simply.

Missy scoffed. “Is that all?”

“Yes,” the Doctor hissed and walked past Missy, down the stairs. Maybe by tomorrow she would have calmed down a little and the Doctor could have a decent conversation with her, but right now he only wanted to see Clara.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for all your sweet, lovely comments! I'm back from TimeLash and posting will now continue as usual.

Clara watched the Doctor as he spread their picnic blanket and even now she wasn't quite sure what to think. A million things were currently going through her head and when they sat down and he held out the bag of Murdis, Clara took one only reluctantly, not quite sure where to start today. She had been thinking about him, about everything she had seen because of him nonstop. The fact that he might or might not be her tutor, the strange Shobogan woman Malaya, what she had witnessed between the Shobogan couple. Clara wanted answers to countless questions and she didn't even know how to ask them.

“You're unusually quiet today,” the Doctor noted.

Clara turned her head and smiled at him, wondering once again if he really was her tutor. In the end, she wasn't sure it really mattered because she loved him nonetheless, but she had to know.

“You're good at fixing tech stuff, aren't you?” she asked.

“Uhm, reasonably good,” he replied hesitantly. “Why?”

In response, Clara reached into her pocket and pulled out the neural block. She paused before she gave it to him and took a moment to admire it. It was strange that such a tiny thing could do so much damage, that it had to power to wipe a mind completely if used correctly. Then she handed it to the Doctor.

“What is this?” he wanted to know, turning the small device around in his hand.

“It's a neural block.”

“Oh, I've heard about those. Never seen one before though,” he replied and lifted it to his face to have a closer look. Then suddenly, he turned to look at Clara. “Where did you get this? And, most importantly, what do you want with it?”

Clara swallowed. “Well, uhm, I stole it from my father's safe. It's the one he used to wipe my tutor's memory. I was wondering if you could-”

“Reverse it, you mean?”

She nodded.

“Well, I probably could, but we'd have to find him to know for sure. I've been looking into it, but I couldn't find anyone who calls himself the Tutor.”

“I think I've found him,” Clara replied and she couldn't help the smile that spread across her face.

The Doctor only frowned at her in return. “You have? How? Where?”

Her smile widened, but the Doctor's frown only deepened in response. He didn't have a clue. Of course, he didn't. If he really was her tutor, he wouldn't remember a thing.

“Well?”

Clara inhaled deeply, suddenly feeling as nervous as she had when she had asked her father about the matter. “I think it's you.”

To her surprise, the Doctor scoffed. “That's ridiculous. I think I'd know if I was your tutor.”

“Oh really?” Clara asked, not without a sarcastic undertone. “And how would you know if you had your memory wiped?”

Now he hesitated and she could clearly see on his face that she had succeeded in making her point.

“Think about it,” she said excitedly. “You came back for no good reason. You don't know me and you could get caught and still, you keep coming back to me as if you've known me for years. You showed me Macbeth, the same book my tutor gave to me. You knew my favourite fairy tale and I never told you-”

“A lucky guess,” he growled.

“Did you ever wear a bowtie?”

That question finally made him stop his protests and Clara watched as he lowered his gaze to the neural block in his hands. The Doctor didn't even need to answer her question for Clara to know that she was right. He was her tutor.

“I'll see what I can do,” he replied simply and slid the device into his pocket. He smiled at her afterwards, but Clara could tell that in his head, he was still pondering the matter. 

“Let's open the mead, shall we?”

She nodded, but then remembered something else she had wanted to ask him for a few days now. The question of Malaya kept coming back to her mind, the thought about how strange she had reacted when Clara had asked if she had been the woman to help the Doctor. There was something about her that was different from all the other Shobogans.

Clara took a sip from the sweet honey wine and then looked at the Doctor. “Are there Time Lords living among the Shobogans?” she wanted to know.

Again, he frowned. “No. What makes you say that?”

“Malaya,” Clara breathed in reply. “There was something different about her.”

“She's a smart woman, but that doesn't make her a Time Lady.”

Clara snorted. “Excuse me, but you're not exactly the most observant person. I said she's different. She knows a lot about the Time Lords and I thought she might have been the woman who helped you, so I asked her, but she reacted very strangely.”

“She wasn't,” the Doctor replied. “She can't have been. She looked completely different.”

“If she is a Time Lady, she could have regenerated, couldn't she?”

Clara cocked an eyebrow at him, but when the Doctor looked up, he looked more intrigued than anything else.

“You never told me what the two of you talked about when you walked away from the feast,” he noted.

Clara lowered her head, but she was unable to suppress the smile on her lips. She had been thinking about that, too, thinking about what she had seen and what it would be like to try it. Somehow it had stirred something inside her that went further than plain curiosity. Whenever she pictured doing it with the Doctor, Clara felt a strange kind of tingling inside of her.

“Have you ever, uhm, tried that thing the Shobogans do?” she wanted to know, avoiding his gaze and nervously sipping her drink.

“What thing?”

Clara finally looked up at him, at the puzzled expression on his face and it made her smile. Her Doctor, her sweet, handsome Doctor.

Without really thinking about it further, Clara set her glass down and leaned forward, locking their lips in a kiss like she had done before. He had been so shy about that in the beginning, but Clara could feel that he was enjoying it, too. There was something exciting about it, about carefully sliding her tongue into his mouth and the Doctor responded quickly, kissing her back with an eagerness he hadn't shown before. It didn't take long and the tingling sensation came back, right between her thighs, along with the sudden urge to be touched by him.

In a swift movement, Clara swung her leg over him and straddled his lap, pressing down against his body. It felt so good, so exciting to have him close even though the tingling was slowly beginning to turn into an itch. Underneath her, the Doctor uttered a strange sound, one not unlike the one she had heard that night in the Shobogan camp, and Clara started grinding against his lap. She was beginning to understand it now and she wanted to try it, but when Clara lowered her hand between them, the Doctor softly pushed her away, breaking the kiss.

“Clara, what are you doing?” he asked breathlessly.

In response, she smiled at him. “This is what I learned from the Shobogans that night, what Malaya told me about,” she explained. “I wasn't sure at first, but I want to try it. With you.”

She bent down to kiss him again, but for some reason, the Doctor held her at a distance. When she looked at him, he seemed almost in shock.

“We can't do that,” he replied, the panic audible in his voice as he scrambled back to his feet. 

Clara stood back up as well, frowning at him. “Why not?”

“Because it's. . . it's-” he broke off, unable to find the words.

“It's what? Not something Time Lords do?”

“Exactly!” the Doctor argued. “It's wrong and. . . just not right.”

“I want to try it, Doctor,” Clara said sincerely. “I. . . I think I'd like it. And I think you'd like it, too.”

Now he looked downright uncomfortable and despite his wrinkles and his grey hair, he seemed more like a lost, little boy than anything else. And his face had gone bright red once again.

“This thing, this. . . _going to bed together_ , we don't do that. Time Lords just don't,” he spluttered nervously.

“I thought you were a Rebel Time Lord,” Clara said, pouting.

“Not when it comes to that.”

“It's okay if you're scared,” she told him.

In reply, the Doctor scoffed. “What makes you think I'm scared?”

“I'm scared, too,” she admitted and finally, the Doctor looked at her properly. “But I'm more curious than scared. Aren't you curious?”

Clara watched his gaze slowly wander down her body and back up, though he seemed unable to really look her in the eyes. “Maybe a little,” he mumbled.

When she stepped forward, she knew that the Doctor was trying to evade her, but Clara merely reached for his hand. “That's what I talked about with Malaya. She told me how it works, what it's like,” she said with a shrug. “I don't think there's anything to be scared of.”

The Doctor gulped, but never said anything.

Clara smiled at him. “Let's sit down and finish the biscuits, okay?” she suggested. “And maybe a bit of snogging?”

The corners of his mouth twitched a little before he smiled back in earnest. “That sounds nice,” he admitted.

Clara sank back down on the blanket, pulling the Doctor down with her and as she leaned against his shoulder and reached for the bag of Murdis, Clara knew that they wouldn't try anything new tonight, but maybe he would overcome his shyness soon.

“There's a meteor shower next week,” the Doctor suddenly said. “Do you wanna sneak out of the Citadel and watch it with me?”

Clara turned her head and smiled. “That sounds nice,” she said, repeating his words.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the comments! Now, I believe we have some secrets to uncover. . .

Clara was wrong, the Doctor was sure of that as he turned the neural block in his hands for the 20th time today. He had been tinkering with it for a few days now, but he wasn't entirely sure if he was doing it right. If he messed up, this whole idea could go terribly wrong and he might lose a few memories. Especially if he wasn't Clara's tutor and he really didn't think he was.

He would know it, wouldn't he? But how would he know? If his mind had been wiped, how could he tell? Shouldn't there be blanks that he couldn't explain? And most important, how could he ever forget about Clara?

The Doctor had gone over the matter again and again and he had indeed found a blank, right before his last regeneration. How had he ended up in the Cloisters? What had he been doing down there? How could Clara have known about the bowtie? What if he actually was her tutor? The Doctor had to admit, that her description sounded a bit like him. Macbeth, wanting to take Clara out of the city, he would have done that. But he really didn't know what he was doing with the neural block in his hands, he wasn't sure whether he had successfully reversed the polarity of the neutron flow and he was afraid of what would happen if he had failed. He couldn't forget about Clara, not again.

“Early again?”

His mentor's voice tore him from his thoughts and the Doctor attempted to hide the neural block by sliding it into his pocket, but in the haste of the moment, the Doctor dropped it instead and it fell to the floor with a thud.

“Uhm, yeah,” the Doctor spluttered as Stonix entered the room. He couldn't find out what the Doctor was really up to or he would be in trouble. He reached under the table with his foot, but the neural block was just out of reach. “I was. . . tinkering. . . a little.”

“I can see that,” Stonix replied and to the Doctor's horror, his gaze wandered to the floor. “Looks like you've dropped something.”

“No, it's fine, I'll pick it up!” the Doctor attempted to say as he rose to his feet, but he was too late. His mentor was already bending down and, a second later, came back up, holding the small device in his hand. His only hope now was that Stonix had no clue what it was.

“Where did you get this?” he asked sharply, holding up the evidence. Of course he knew. The Doctor sighed while his heart sank to his feet. “Neural blocks are only to be used with the High Council's approval. They are kept in a guarded vault. How did you get one of these?”

He opened his mouth, but closed it again when he realized that any attempt at an explanation would implicate Clara and, by extent, give away their secret. Stonix couldn't know.

“Did you break in to steal this?!”

“No,” the Doctor growled in reply.

“Then how did you get your hands on a neural block and what were you trying to-” Stonix broke off and his gaze once again trailed to the device in his hands as he seemed to consider something. The Doctor was already beginning to fear the worst, but even he hadn't expected what his mentor was about to do.

He slammed the device on the floor where it hit with a crashing sound before his mentor stepped forward, straight onto the neural block and crushed it with his foot until it was nothing but a useless piece of scrap.

“I told you once before and I'm not going to say it again,” Stonix hissed sharply, his hand raised in a menacing gesture. “Stay out of the Lord President's business. Don't ask questions. Don't dig into his past or yours for that matter.”

The Doctor swallowed hard and suppressed the feeling of his hopes being crushed. There was only one reason for Stonix to act like he did and that was the proof he had been looking for. He really was Clara's tutor and Stonix had known the whole time.

“If you value your life and your freedom, you do as I say and drop the matter,” his mentor said and went to pick up the broken neural block. “I'll make this disappear. I'll pretend I never saw it, I'll pretend that you never asked a single question, but you have got to stop, Doctor. Do you we have an understanding?”

“Yes,” the Doctor said, but his voice only came out as a whisper. He was lying to everyone. He was lying to Missy and he was lying to Stonix and he did it all because of Clara. There was nothing they could do or say that would make him abandon her and if what Clara had said was true, he would find out. If it was true, he would make the President pay for what he had done to Clara.

* * *

“Now you're the one who's awfully quiet,” Clara remarked as they walked through the fields. The suns had already set and it was getting darker by the minute, but fortunately, there were no clouds in the sky tonight and it was still pleasantly warm. The perfect weather for watching a meteor shower.

“Had a disagreement with my mentor today,” the Doctor explained, but he decided not to tell Clara the details just yet. He needed to be certain before giving her false hope and he wasn't quite certain yet. And above all, he really didn't have the hearts to tell her that the neural block, along with their best chance of finding out if he really was her tutor, had been destroyed. “But it's nothing serious. He'll calm down.”

“Oh, okay,” she uttered. “Did you get anywhere with the neural block?”

The Doctor sighed. “No,” he admitted. “But I'm gonna do some reading, see if I can find out more.”

Clara nodded, but then lifted her head and looked ahead across the fields. “Where are you taking me? This isn't the way to the Shobogans.”

He turned his head and smiled. “No Shobogans tonight. Too noisy. We're gonna watch the meteor shower.”

“And where are we gonna do that?” she enquired curiously.

The Doctor pointed ahead to where the barn was vaguely visible in the dim evening light. “I used to come here a lot when I was a child. Used to hide in there.”

“You went outside the Citadel _as a kid_?”

“That was before your father put up the shield and passed the law,” the Doctor reminisced. Life had been a little easier then, back when he and his friend had been free to run across the red fields. “Lots of people lived out here, not just the Shobogans. It all changed.”

“It changed when my mother died,” Clara admitted sadly. “That's what made my father hate them so much, when they killed her. Now, having met them, I think it was probably nothing but an accident.”

“Probably, yeah,” the Doctor replied, but his thoughts were interrupted when the first shooting star appeared in the sky. “Look!”

Clara raised her head and he watched as a smile spread across her face. Together, they came to a halt right next to the barn. “It's beautiful.”

“It's only starting, come on,” he prompted her, but soon realized that they had left the blanket at her house. Instead, he took off his velvet coat and spread it out for them to serve as a substitute. “Sit down.”

The Doctor lay down on his coat and Clara didn't hesitate before she followed his example. She leaned her head against his chest and the Doctor wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her a little closer. It was exactly like he had imagined it would be. Just him and Clara, watching the stars, far away from everything that troubled them while one after another, the meteors appeared in the night sky.

“I love it,” Clara whispered next to him.

“Yeah,” the Doctor breathed, “so do I.”


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *group hug* Thank you for the sweet comments! Now, I believe this is a moment you've been waiting for. . .

Clara loved the meteor shower, she really did. She loved that he had taken her out here to watch it together, but she just couldn't bring herself to pay attention to the stars when there was something infinitely more interesting right next to her, or rather, underneath her. Their lips were locked, their bodies entangled in an impossible embrace and as Clara started grinding against the Doctor's lap, she could feel the tingling sensation return. It was so strange and foreign and yet, the excitement seemed to overpower every last bit of fear that she felt and then there were the Doctor's reassuring sounds and the fact that they were experiencing something new together.

He moaned into her mouth before he broke the kiss, gasping for air as their lips parted, and smiled at her. “Are you okay?”

Clara chuckled and nodded before she bent back down and kissed him, but this time she didn't meet his lips. Instead, Clara brought her mouth to his neck while she slowly unbuttoned his shirt. She had half expected him to protest and her hearts skipped a little beat when she realized he wasn't going to. In a surge of bravery, Clara lowered her hand between them, between his legs. The Doctor sucked in his breath as she gave him a soft squeeze and even though Clara didn't really know what she was doing, it seemed to be the right thing because she found him half hard already. When she began to massage him through his trousers, he uttered a sound that seemed to shoot straight through her body, tugging at her insides and stirring something she hadn't even known it existed.

“What are you doing?” he wanted to know, his breath coming out ragged as he spoke, but Clara knew that he liked it because he arched his hips up, rubbing himself against her hand.

“I wanna do it,” Clara whispered truthfully. “Here. Now. I want you.”

The Doctor shut his eyes when she squeezed him a little harder and exhaled sharply and Clara knew that she had him exactly where she wanted. He was feeling the exact same thing that she felt and he wanted more, just like she did. Clara lifted her lips back to his mouth and kissed him.

“Touch me,” she breathed onto his lips.

“Where?” the Doctor asked breathlessly.

In response, Clara sat up and swiftly undid her robe, throwing it aside to reveal the sheer, white undergarment that probably left very little the Doctor's imagination. His eyes opened again and fell onto her body, her breasts that were now visible underneath the dress. There was something in his gaze that she had never seen before, not on him and not on any other Time Lord she had ever met and Clara could only find one word to describe it: lust.

“Anywhere you want,” she replied.

At first, he didn't seem quite sure what to do and he sat up a little awkwardly while Clara remained on his lap and for a while, he merely looked. Then he carefully lifted his hand to her face, his touch so light that it tickled on her skin and made Clara giggle. His fingers trailed down her neck so softly that it almost felt like the caress of a ghost until his flat palm came to rest on her breast.

“Is that okay?” he asked quietly.

“Yes,” she chuckled. “Very.”

“Can I take it off?”

The Doctor nodded towards her gown and Clara granted him a playful frown in return. “If I can take off yours?”

He seemed to consider it for a moment before he agreed and Clara reached for the hem of her undergarment before she pulled it over her head, leaving her completely naked and exposed. It should have bothered her because she had been taught not to let anyone see her skin, but for some reason, it didn't. It was only the Doctor who saw her and she wanted him to see. In return, Clara helped him out of his clothes and even though the belt and trousers proved to be a struggle, they were eventually cast aside and joined her robe on the ground next to them.

Suddenly, under her gaze, the Doctor seemed a little insecure, but Clara just couldn't bring herself to look away. Time Lords were shy and prude and she had never seen a man's naked body before in her entire life and somehow, it was a fascinating sight, even more so because it was the Doctor's body she was admiring. That flat, pale chest, the little hint of a belly and his manhood, half erect between his legs. Clara bit down on her lip when she realized she was feeling desire for him.

The Doctor leaned forward and brought his lips to her breast, kissing it, and she drew in a sharp breath when he sucked her nipple. It felt like electricity, like a thrill shooting through her body, settling between her legs almost like an urge and what Clara felt was almost a need to be touched by him.

Gently, she took his hand and led it to her sex, to where she was already wet and aching for him to bring some sort relief to this maddening feeling. His finger slid between her folds.

“Touch me,” she half begged him, her voice quivering with excitement. Clara bent down and nipped at his ear.

“How?” the Doctor wanted to know.

She groaned impatiently, pressing herself against his hand to increase the friction just a little. His reluctance almost felt like torture. “Just do it, please.”

Finally, the Doctor started to move, rubbing his finger along her clit and even though Clara tried to restrain herself, a moan spilled from her lips and she found herself countering his movements. It was unlike anything she had ever felt before, it was strange and intense and she was craving more. There was nothing in her head right now but the greedy need for him to go on until she couldn't take it any longer.

“Are you alright?” the Doctor asked carefully, a hint of worry in his voice and in the back of her mind, Clara knew that her moans were probably confusing him, but she didn't care. The only thing she cared about was that he continued to touch her.

“Yes,” she panted hoarsely. “Don't stop. Do what you want, but don't stop.”

His fingers slid inside her and Clara gasped in response. For a moment, she wondered if they would ever be able to stop because she couldn't imagine ever wanting this feeling to end. The Doctor had stirred a need inside of her and all she wanted was for him to go deeper and faster and he did, working her up to a point where she thought she would burst any minute, but it felt too good to stop. It just wasn't possible. Then suddenly, it was as if someone had flicked a switch inside her brain, sending her it into overload just as her aching desire had begun to turn into torment. It came as a sudden flash, as a wave of pleasure, spreading across her entire body and Clara cried out when the feeling was beginning to overwhelm her. Afterwards, there was nothing but pure relief and a moment of sheer, peaceful bliss when the Doctor withdrew his hand.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked worriedly. “You were-”

“No,” she panted, completely out of breath. She was exhausted and exhilarated at the same time. “No, no, no, not at all. You were amazing. This was amazing.”

“Are you sure?”

Clara nodded and despite the lack of breath, bent forward to brush their lips together in a brief kiss. She was going make him see, she was going to make him feel exactly what she had felt just now. So what if it wasn't something Time Lords did. It was the best damn thing she had ever experienced in her entire life.

Gently, she pushed him back until he landed flat on his back and Clara reached between them and wrapped her hand around his member. She gave him a soft stroke.

“Tell me how you like it,” she whispered.

“Uhm,” the Doctor spluttered, but seemed to have a hard time finding the right words while the blood was drained from his brain. He was growing harder in her palm. “This, uhm, this is nice.”

Clara smiled to herself when he closed his eyes and let his head fall back, his mouth open, his breath ragged in his arousal. His member was hot and heavy, rocking into her hand, and Clara found herself wondering what he would feel like inside of her, if it would be different than a few minutes ago, if it would be better. Even though her sex was still burning from her first orgasm, she straddled his lap and led him to her entrance.

“Please.” Now it was the Doctor's turn to beg and Clara didn't feel like waiting any longer when she lowered herself on top of him.

They both gasped at the same time when he filled her up and even though it stung a little and Clara needed a moment to adjust to his size, that was soon forgotten when she realized just how good it felt. His hands wandered to her hips, guiding her movements, and Clara threw her head back, revelling in the ecstatic feeling he caused her as thrust up. The Doctor moaned loudly underneath her.

“This feels good,” he groaned and even in her rapture, it made Clara laugh.

“More than good,” she corrected him, moaning when he plunged back into her.

Suddenly, the Doctor sat up and wrapped his arms around her back, pulling her deeper onto his lap. Their lips clashed in a quick, sloppy kiss while they rocked together. Even though she had felt love for him before, Clara knew that at this moment, while they were one, she truly, deeply loved him. Here they were, two Rebel Time Lords, far away from the Citadel, doing what no Time Lord had dared to do in centuries, millennia, and right now she was ready to call them all mad. The Doctor's thrust came quicker now and harder and Clara soon felt the now familiar sensation of what seemed like electricity ripping through her body when she came and the Doctor cried out at the same time, spilling himself inside of her as his movements stopped. Panting and gasping for air, they sank back onto his velvet coat. For a long time, the only sounds that could be heard were their breaths and the chirping of crickets. Above them, a pair of shooting stars crossed the night sky and Clara could imagine nothing better than this and she could imagine no one she'd rather be here with than her Doctor.


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys for the sweet comments! I'm glad you enjoyed their little encounter!
> 
> Since the topic already came up multiple times, here's a few words about looms: I read up on it in light of this fanfic and found a pretty good article on a fandom Wikipedia page that tells you everything you need to know about looms. They became necessary because the Time Lords lost the ability to procreate sexually - meaning they can't have children the way humans do.

Clara had never felt so well rested, so happy, so free from the Time Lords and their silly, ridiculous rules. The Doctor had opened her eyes and she had opened his and here they were, in the barn, still cuddled up like they had fallen asleep the night before with only his velvet coat as their blanket. Then Clara opened her eyes and realized that the suns were already up.

“Doctor!” she said quietly, but he was fast asleep. Clara gave him a soft nudge. “Doctor, it's morning. The suns are up.”

He sat up with start and even though he still struggled to keep his eyes open, there was a look of horror in them as he was slowly waking up. Then came the panic.

“We have to go!” The Doctor half shouted and jumped out of bed, reaching for his clothes to put them back on. “Come on, Clara! Get dressed!”

“Why are you in such a hurry?” she wanted to know and reached for her undergarment, slipping it over her head to cover herself.

“Because if we're lucky, your father hasn't noticed your absence yet, but we need to hurry! You need to get back!”

Clara laughed. “I have no intention of going back,” she stated plainly.

“You have to, Clara, please, now get dressed,” the Doctor urged her, the panic audible in his voice as he struggled to fasten his belt.

But she didn't move. Instead, Clara crossed her arms in front of her chest. “My father kept me a prisoner for 168 years, he took away the only friend that I had, I am not going to pretend that none of this ever happened, I am not going back!”

“Clara,” he said her name hurriedly and crossed the distance between the two of them, placing his hands on her upper arms and looking intently at her. “I love you and I will find a solution to all of it, but I need more time. Please, you have to go back.”

“No!” she said determinedly.

“Where would you even go?”

“I don't know,” Clara raised her voice at him and as she realized that she really had no clue, she felt the tears run down her cheeks. It didn't matter. I didn't matter that she didn't know. But she could never go back. “Stay with you, live with the Shobogans, I don't care. I can't go back, Doctor, please don't make me!”

Suddenly, Clara felt as small and hopeless as she had on the day she had let the Doctor leave and more tears kept coming. She was already back in her cage even though they were still outside the city walls and it was slowly suffocating her. Clara gasped, but suddenly found that she couldn't breathe, there wasn't enough air, she was as good as dead.

“Shhh,” the Doctor hushed her softly and sank down on the small, improvised bed next to her, closing his arms around her in an embrace. “It's going to be okay, I promise. Have I ever let you down?”

“No,” she sobbed in reply. In his arms, it was a lot easier to breathe and slowly, the tears subsided.

“Come on,” he said gently and lifted his hand to wipe away her tears. “Let's get dressed and I promise, I'll meet you again tonight.

Clara turned her head and looked at him for a long moment. “Are you really going to get me out of there?”

“Yes,” he promised. “But only if you get dressed now and come back to the Citadel with me. If your father thinks that you've been sneaking out, it will only get more difficult.”

Clara knew that he was right. Of course, he was right, so she had no other option but to do as he said.

 

They didn't speak much on the way back to the Citadel and with the suns now rising above the horizon, Clara was beginning to worry what her father would do if he noticed that she was missing, but whatever it was, she vowed not to let him do it. She was no longer the same person, she wasn't a child that could be locked up in her room and as soon as she could, Clara would escape that house forever.

“I'll come back tonight,” the Doctor repeated his promise as they came to a halt next to her garden wall. “And I will find a way to get you out of there, Clara, I swear.”

Clara nodded softly. “I'll meet you here tonight.”

In response, he uttered a long sigh and suddenly, the Doctor reached for her hand, lifted it up to his lips and pressed a swift kiss to her knuckles. “If I knew a place for us to go, I wouldn't ask you to go back. But the capital isn't safe and neither is the Shobogan camp.”

“I understand,” she replied. “I'm sorry about earlier, I overreacted.”

The Doctor glanced around and once he had made sure that no one else was near, he cupped her face in his hands and gave her a brief kiss on the lips. “See you tonight.”

“Tonight,” Clara confirmed with a smile.

When Clara walked through the wall and into her garden, she looked around and noticed to her relief that no one had spotted her, yet as she moved on she became aware of movements in the woods, of footsteps and voices that called out her name. Her absence had been noticed, so Clara did the only thing she could do and hurried back to the house.

 

“Where on Gallifrey have you been?!”

The Lord President's sharp, angry voice greeted her as soon as she stepped through the door and Clara instantly straightened her shoulders to make herself taller and racked her brain for a good excuse as to why she hadn't been in her room. She didn't even know what time it was or how long they had been searching for her.

“I, uhm,” she spluttered and then, in a flash of inspiration, the solution sudden came to her. “I'm sorry, Father. I went out into the garden last night to watch the meteor shower and I must have fallen asleep. I only just woke-”

“ _Lies!_ ” her father barked and Clara flinched at the volume of his voice. “The guards have been searching for you for hours! They would have found you!”

“The guards don't know the way through the forest!” Clara argued loudly. “Not like I do!”

“You would have heard them, they-”

The President was interrupted when the door flung open and one of the guards stepped into the house, carrying what Clara immediately recognized as the picnic blanket she and the Doctor always used.

“Miss Clara,” the guard blurted out, “there you are, we've been looking for you all over.”

It was her chance, Clara knew it, so she grabbed it because there was no other option. “Well, at least you found my blanket,” she replied and reached for it, taking it out of the guard's hands. “I must have left it there when I woke up. Thank you.”

She turned back to look at her father, but she could read no emotion from his face. Instead, his gaze kept wandering back and forth between the guard and the blanket in her hands and Clara had no idea what he was going to do next. Did he believe her? Had he figured out the truth? If he had, she would make a run for it. Clara wouldn't stay and endure his wrath, she would run and never come back.

“Call off the search,” he told the guard after what had seemed like a painfully long minute. “Tell them Clara is back.”

The guard nodded and retreated back outside while Clara was left alone with her father. He was still angry, she could feel it.

“I'm sorry, Father. I promise it won't happen again.”

“Damn right it won't,” he growled. “Because you will stay in your room until I tell you otherwise.”

Clara heard the words, she heard them loud and clear, but she was no longer the same person he had kept here for over a century. She inhaled deeply and gathered up all of her courage before she replied.

“No.”

The Lord President arched up his eyebrows. “No?”

“No,” Clara repeated determinedly. “You keep me in this house, in this garden, that's fine, but I will not be confined to my room like a child. You built this garden for me, to keep me here, to keep me happy and I will not let you take that away from me. It is the only bit of freedom that I have and it's mine.”

“Clara-”

“I will not stay in my room,” she told him. “And that's my final word.”

Clara tried her best to hide the fact that she was shaking, that she was actually terrified of what her father was going to do, but she was determined not to let him see that. If he managed to lock her up, Clara would never be able to see the Doctor again. She wouldn't allow that to happen.

Her father looked at her for a long moment as if he was examining her, but to her surprise, he eventually nodded. “Very well,” he replied, his voice now calm and quiet. “You're right. I'm keeping you here for your safety and the garden is safe, so you're right. I have no reason to keep you locked in your room just because I'm angry that you overslept.”

At first, Clara was too surprised to speak. Had her father just given in to her demands? Had she really managed to convince him? It seemed almost too good to be true, but as she looked at him, Clara didn't see him protest.

“Alright,” she said eventually. “Thank you.”

“There is some breakfast left over if you're hungry,” her father explained.

Clara frowned. It really seemed too good to be true, but her growling stomach told her to leave it be for the time being.

“I am,” she confirmed warily.

“Then let's eat,” he told her with a smile and placed his arm on her shoulder to lead her into the dining room. Clara followed him reluctantly, but it seemed that she had really managed to convince her father after all.


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all your amazing comments!!! I can't stress enough how grateful I am that you're taking the time to respond to my work and I'm so happy that you're enjoying it :)  
> But I believe we have some questions that need answering. . .

The library was a maze made up of rows and rows of shelves filled to the brim with books and scrolls, everything that had ever been written on Gallifrey and countless writings from all over the universe. It was also a perfect hiding place and today, the Doctor really didn’t want to be spotted.

He had sneaked into the building when Stonix had entered his little laboratory in the back and so far he had managed to evade every Time Lord who had come in to read. All those decades sorting books had taught the Doctor something very important: he knew the library better than the knew the insides of his own pockets. The Doctor hadn’t come here to help his mentor or to clean up after the lazy readers, today he had come to help himself. He knew that there were books about memory wipes because he had seen them before, scrolls that would tell him just exactly how neural blocks worked. He refused to believe that his memories were lost forever if he truly was Clara's mentor. There just had to be a way to retrieve them and the Doctor vowed to find it, yet so far his search has been less than successful.

The Doctor glimpsed around the corner and noticed a young Time Lord standing in front of the shelf that held the book he needed, but to his frustration, he didn't appear as if he planned to move anytime soon. Still hiding behind the corner, the Doctor considered his options. Could he risk being seen by even one Time Lord or would that alert his mentor to his presence?

Just as the Doctor was about to make his move, the library doors suddenly swung open, hitting the walls behind with a loud bang and the Doctor flinched and instantly retreated back to his hiding spot. He had picked the perfect aisle for it, filled with books about the most boring era in Gallifreyan history that no one ever looked at. No one would disturb him here. The Doctor, on the other hand, had a nice view on the rest of the library from behind the shelf and he spied through a gap in the books to see who had entered.

At first, the Doctor saw nothing at all, then, one by one, the Time Lords that had been reading in here for hours were starting to move towards the exit, their heads bowed. In his mind, he tried to find a good reason for their behaviour that had nothing to do with what he feared was happening, but then the Doctor heard his voice.

“Stonix!” the Lord President's angry voice echoed in the hall when the last Time Lord had left the building and then the Doctor could hear his mentor's hurried footsteps. Instinctively, he ducked even though it was impossible for them to see him up here.

“Lord President,” Stonix gasped when he had entered the hall, “wh-what are you doing here?”

The Doctor lifted his head just a little, spying through the gap to get a proper look at them. The President had come to the library in the company of two armed guards and even though he appeared to have come for Stonix, it made the Doctor a little uneasy. What business could they possibly have? Well, the Doctor assumed that he was going to find out soon enough.

“I am missing something from my private safe. You haven't seen a certain neural block lately, have you?”

The Doctor's hearts sank into his boots as soon as he heard those words and even though, in the back of his mind, he knew what it meant and what was going to happen, he didn't really want to believe it. Not his mentor. Not Stonix. He was doomed. Then, something surprising happened.

“No,” Stonix replied. “Neural blocks are restricted items. And I can promise you, he took nothing from your safe. He has no idea.”

“Well, there's only one alternative then, is there? Are you saying that my own daughter betrayed me?” the President asked, his voice menacingly sharp.

“Of course not,” his mentor responded nervously. “But maybe one of your staff-”

“My staff is loyal to me,” he barked. “It's your protégé I don't trust. I told you to keep him under control, Stonix! That was the deal we made when you begged me not to throw him into a cell!”

“I can promise you, Lord President, the Doctor is innocent,” his mentor said and the Doctor finally realized just what was going on. Stonix was protecting him, covering for him even though to him it must have looked as if the Doctor had truly taken the neural block. That was why he had destroyed it, to keep him safe. Because the Doctor really was Clara's tutor, there was no doubt about that now.

“The Doctor can't remember a thing,” Stonix went on. “He doesn't remember you or your daughter. He suspects the gap is his memory has been caused by a head trauma that happened before his regeneration.”

“I want him locked up!”

“But you said-”

“I changed my mind,” the President remarked with a shrug. “I'm the President. It's my right as well as my duty to make sure that my people are safe and they aren't as long as the Doctor is still walking this planet, corrupting everyone with his insane ideas, corrupting _my own daughter_!”

“But-”

“Enough!” the Lord President silenced his mentor, his voice cutting through the air like a sword. When he spoke again, he was calm and determined. “I expect you to hand him over the next time he shows up here.”

When the President turned around to leave, his guards following on his heels, the Doctor knew that he had to get out. Only where would he go? He couldn't hide in the library because Stonix would immediately inform the President and he couldn't go through the city because there was no doubt that all the guards had already been informed. If he was caught, the Doctor would spend the rest of his life in a cell and he would never be able to see Clara again. He had to get her out. There just had to be a way. At first, the Doctor would hide at Missy's place because there was no one else he could trust. Missy would never betray him. But how would he even get out of the library?

Just when the Doctor was about to turn around, he felt a hand cover his mouth and he tried to glance over his shoulder to see who had caught him, but he couldn't see. It was over. They had him now.

“Quiet,” Malaya's voice was nothing but a whisper and when she removed her hand from his mouth, the Doctor uttered a relieved sigh.

“Malaya,” he breathed. “Rassilon's Ghost, you scared me.”

“We have to go,” she mouthed and waved her hand, gesturing for him to follow her. “I know a way through the Cloisters.”

The Doctor had thought he had discovered every secret passageway, but as he followed the Shobogan woman through a hidden door in the library, down into the Cloisters, he soon realized that she seemed to know the ruins better than he ever had. He had never been in this part of the tunnels and he decided it was best to stick close to her so as not to lose the path. They didn't speak for a long time while the Doctor's mind was still trying to come to terms with everything he had overheard between his mentor and the Lord President. First, there was the confirmation he had been looking for, confirmation that he really was Clara's tutor, that the President had erased his memory, that he had intended to let him rot in a cell until Stonix had pleaded with him not to do it. Not that that still mattered now. The Doctor was a fugitive.

“What were you doing in the Citadel?” the Doctor demanded to know when he realized that he still didn't know how Malaya had come to be in the right place at exactly the right time to save him.

“I came to warn you,” she replied, but the woman never turned around to look at him. Instead, her gaze was fixed on the path ahead while data ghosts roamed the tunnels around them. “The guards came to our camp last night, looking for a woman, the young woman you brought to us.”

“Oh,” the Doctor uttered in response because he had no idea what else to say. He had placed them in danger without even wanting to.

“Nothing happened to us, don't worry,” Malaya reassured him. “But I'm not entirely sure that everyone they questioned kept quiet. You can't come back, neither one of you. It's too dangerous now that the President might know.”

“I have nowhere else to go,” the Doctor argued loudly. “Missy will hide me for now, but I can't stay there forever.”

Suddenly, Malaya spun around on her heels and looked straight at him. Even in the darkness, the Doctor could feel her gaze boring into him as if she was trying to read his mind.

“Tell me, the woman you brought to us, is she really the President's own daughter?” the Shobogan woman wanted to know and suddenly, the Doctor realized that her voice was shaking.

He had no choice but to tell her the truth. The Doctor swallowed and nodded. “Yes,” he confirmed. “Yes, Clara is his daughter.”

Malaya took a deep breath. “Doctor,” she said hesitantly. “We have to talk.”

He had braced himself for a lecture, for anything, but as they continued to walk through the tunnels, along a path that would lead him straight to Missy's house, to safety, the Doctor had never expected to hear the story that Malaya was telling him.


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all your sweet comments! But what's a Saturday noon without some angst?

The Doctor knew that he was taking a risk in sneaking off to see Clara, but he managed with the help of a robe drawn over his head and Missy distracting two guards. His intention had been to tell her everything he had learned, but when she kissed him on the lips and pulled him down on their picnic blanket, happy, excited, he just didn't have the hearts to do it. Just for a moment, while he was in her arms, the Doctor could pretend that none of it was happening, he could forget about everything that worried him. Maybe it was better not to trouble her at all until he had a solution and in the meantime, the Doctor could just enjoy how she made him feel.

It all happened too quickly. The sensation of her naked skin on his own, the way she sucked at his lip, that insane feeling of diving into her. Somehow, it was as if his head was in the clouds, completely void of any other thought but that of Clara. Maybe, in a way, the Shobogans were wiser than the Time Lords because he couldn't imagine how they would voluntarily miss out on that tiny moment of sheer relief and emptiness when he released himself inside of her. Gasping for breath, the Doctor collapsed next to her.

Clara was panting, but she still managed to giggle. “Can you imagine what the Time Lords would do if they caught us doing this?” she wanted to know.

He scoffed. The Doctor didn't even want to imagine it. “I assume they'd persecute us for. . . I don't even know,” he replied and then the thoughts he had successfully managed to repress suddenly came crashing back. They were in danger, both of them, and they were still sneaking off like two lovesick puppies as if they were asking for trouble. Maybe he should tell Clara.

“And you still want to leave Gallifrey?” Clara asked him and she smiled when she turned to look at him. The happiness he saw in her eyes almost broke his heart. “Even though you can have this?”

The Doctor's gaze darkened. Leaving Gallifrey was one of the few options he had left if he didn't want to end up in a cell. “Yes,” he confirmed and just like that, the happiness vanished from Clara's face. “But I'm not going alone.”

She frowned at him in response. “What do you mean?”

The Doctor reached for her hand and pulled it up to his lips, kissing it. “We're gonna leave together,” he said determinedly. “I'm taking you with me.”

Clara opened her mouth to respond, but it seemed as if she couldn't find the words.

“There are things you need to know,” the Doctor went on. He needed to tell her, but if he came out with it now, Clara would panic, she would scold him for coming here, maybe she would even do something stupid just because she was afraid. The Doctor needed a plan, a good one. Otherwise, their escape was doomed from the start.

“Well, tell me then,” Clara prompted him.

“Not here, not tonight,” he said and granted her a smile. “There is someone you have to meet first. Do you remember the way to the library?”

She nodded. It was the perfect plan. The Doctor could go there through the tunnels without being spotted and Clara was always free to roam the city because no one had even the slightest idea who she was. It was perfect.

“Can you meet me there tomorrow night?” he wanted to know.

“Why don't you come here?”

The Doctor sighed. He had only managed to come to the President's mansion with Missy's aid and he was fairly certain that she wouldn't help him again unless he told her exactly what he was up to. It was too dangerous, but he couldn't tell Clara that without worrying her. “The person I'd like you to meet can only come to the library.”

“Okay,” she replied warily, her eyebrows raised in confusion. “Who is it?”

In response, the Doctor grinned at her. “It's gonna be a surprise,” he said and sat back up. “Now come on, let's get dressed.”

Despite Clara's protests, the Doctor managed to convince her to put their clothes back on and he was already dreading his way back through the Citadel, worrying about what would happen to Clara if they caught him. Knowing her father, she would never even find out what happened to him. He felt so uneasy as they walked back towards the hole in the wall. If only he had a plan already, if only he could promise her that everything was going to be fine. But what would they do? Where would they go? The Doctor simply couldn't say.

“I guess that's good night for now?” she asked, but he wasn't quite finished yet.

The Doctor took her hands in his own and squeezed them maybe a little too roughly. “Clara, I need you to know that I love you and I will do everything I can to get you out of here,” he promised urgently. He just had to say it in case he got caught. Clara needed to know.

In response, she uttered a nervous laugh. “I know,” she replied. “Why are you saying it now? Is something wrong?”

“No,” he lied and forced himself to smile at her. “I just wanted you to know.”

Clara smiled at him in return. “I love you, too. And I trust you.”

The Doctor pressed a swift kiss to her forehead and then let go of her hand before he jumped through the wall and into the street. There, he was just about to pull the hood over his face when he realized that it was already too late and he had been spotted.

Missy was leaning against the wall right next to him, arms crossed in front of her chest and the Doctor didn't need a lot of imagination to know she had witnessed more than enough, more than he would have ever told her.

“Follow you here after distracting the guards. Found your little hole,” she remarked, her voice cold and dry. His friend was inspecting her fingernails as if they were a lot more interesting than what she had just uncovered. “Dimensional shift bomb worked after all, I see.”

“Missy-”

In a sudden movement, she pushed herself off the wall and walked towards him, looking him straight into the eyes. “I think it's time for the truth, Doctor. Why are you sneaking into the President's garden? Why are you walking through the city with this ridiculous robe and why am I hiding you in my house like you're a criminal?”

The Doctor gritted his teeth. “It's a long story.”

“I've got all the time in the world,” she responded.

The sound of footsteps caught his attention and the Doctor turned his head to see a guard pass the dead-end street, but luckily for him, he never noticed them. He needed to get off the street.

“Can we discuss this inside?” the Doctor asked in a hushed voice.

“Certainly not,” Missy replied harshly. “You're not stepping through my door until I know what is going on.”

“Missy, please,” he hissed, throwing her a pleading look. “If the guards catch me, they'll arrest me.”

“Well, you better start talking then.”

The Doctor groaned impatiently, but he was out of options. He had to tell her something and right now, he couldn't even come up with a decent lie, so he told her nothing but the truth. How Clara had caught him stealing the apple, how he had gone back to see her, how they had visited the Shobogans, that really, he had met her before but the President had wiped his memory and that that was the reason he was in hiding.

“Boy, you really know how to get into trouble,” Missy remarked and rolled her eyes. Then she smacked him across the head. “The President's daughter? Really?”

The Doctor glared at her, rubbing the back of his head that was hurting from the impact. Then, luckily for him, Missy started to move in the direction of her house. “I heard some weird sounds coming from the garden. Please, at least tell me you weren't doing what I think you were doing.”

The Doctor remained silent. He had left that part out because he knew how Missy would react, but apparently, his silence was enough of a giveaway.

“ _Ew!_ ” Missy blurted out immediately, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “That is revolting! What are you, an animal?! _Gross!_ ”

“It's actually kind of fun,” he mumbled in reply.

Missy only made a gagging sound. “You're disgusting and vile and. . . ew!”

“Will you please stop this?” the Doctor asked, hoping that his annoyance was showing.

“Will _you_ stop this?” Missy demanded to know, turning her head to look straight at him. “Will you stop seeing her? Because you know that they'll catch you at some point if you continue to sneak into the President's garden.”

“I can't!”

“Yes, you can,” his friend argued. “Just leave her alone. Stay out of the President's business, hide until your next regeneration. Then you can assume a different name and no one will ever know.”

“I really can't, Missy, I made a promise,” the Doctor insisted sharply. “I won't let her down, not again.”

Suddenly, Missy came to a halt and once again, the Doctor glanced around nervously, hoping that there weren't any guards in sight. He couldn't be caught now.

“Rassilon's rod, you're gonna steal her,” she realized.

“I can't steal her!” he replied loudly. “The President's doesn't own her, Clara is not anyone's property.”

“But you're gonna run away with her, aren't you? You're gonna leave Gallifrey?”

For a moment, the Doctor thought he saw a hint of fear in Missy's eyes, but he decided to ignore it for now while they were still out in the open.

“Yes,” he growled in reply. “Now, can we please go home before they catch me?”

Missy looked at him for a while, but eventually, she nodded. The Doctor uttered a sigh of relief. Soon, he would be safe and soon, he would come up with a plan. He and Clara would leave somehow. As his eyes wandered to the night sky, the Doctor realized that the TARDIS was gone once again, that she had been caught. His hearts sank a little. If even the TARDIS couldn't escape this damn place, what chance did they have?


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so, so much for all your amazing comments! I am so flattered that you love this so much. . . which is why I'm terribly sorry about this. . .

The Doctor had the hood of his robe drawn deep over his face while he waited by the library's front door for Clara to show up. Malaya was already inside and the Doctor couldn't wait to give her the news that was going to change her life forever. However, he wished he could also tell her how he was going to get them out of here, but the Doctor still had no idea. He had briefly talked about it with Malaya, but she had confirmed his suspicion that living with the Shobogans would not be an option. The President would find them there in a matter of days. They needed something better. They needed an escape plan, preferably before the Doctor was caught by the Citadel's guards. Maybe Missy would be able to come up with one, but the Doctor was too afraid to ask her. She hadn't reacted well to the news that he was planning on running away with Clara and he wasn't entirely sure she would be of much help.

Finally, he spotted Clara's small figure across the street and since no one else was in sight at this time of night, the Doctor swiftly pulled his hood down and waved for her to come inside.

“What on Gallifrey are you wearing?” Clara asked, the amusement audible in her voice as she hurried inside. She giggled at the sight of him and the Doctor threw her a dark glance in return. He still didn't want to burden her with the whole truth, the truth that they were looking for him and that even coming here could end in his arrest. Clara would only worry unnecessarily.

“What do you mean?” he asked in return. “These are the robes of my chapter.”

When he closed the door behind them, Clara stopped and beamed at him. She looked so happy. No, not telling her was the right thing to do. “Didn't take you for the traditional sort.”

“What can I say?” He shrugged and then bent down to give her a brief kiss. “I'm a man of mystery and surprises.”

“Time to lift one of the mysteries,” Clara reminded him instantly. “Who have I come to meet?”

“Follow me,” he replied and closed his arm around her shoulder to lead the way into the library.

 

Malaya was waiting exactly where the Doctor had left her and when she spotted them, the woman rose from her seat and crossed the room to meet him. Next to him, Clara came to a halt.

“You're Malaya,” Clara said when she realized who the woman was. She exchanged a glance between him and the woman. “But we've already met.”

“You've met, but you haven't been properly introduced,” the Doctor corrected her. “You were right, Clara. Malaya isn't who she said she was.”

While the confusion in Clara's expression only grew, Malaya seemed unable to take her eyes off Clara. She watched her for a long moment with pure and utter fascination.

“Well, who are you then?” Clara eventually asked.

Malaya smiled in response. “I'm not one of the Shobogans,” she explained. “I'm from the capital and over two centuries ago, I met them for the first time. The relationship between Time Lords and Shobogans wasn't as bad as it is today, but it needed improvement, so I became an ambassador to them. They greeted me with nothing but love and kindness, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make Vankath see reason. The more time I spent with them, the more I loved them, but his hatred grew by the day. I was becoming less like a Time Lady and more like a Shobogan and I loved it. I didn't want to give them up. Until Vankath made me choose between him and the people who had accepted me as one of their own, the people that had made me part of their family.”

Clara frowned at her in response. “Why did he make you choose? What did he have to do with anything?”

Malaya smiled at her before she replied. “The Lord President was my husband.”

Her words hung in the air for a long moment and just like the Doctor had needed time to truly let the news sink in, Clara took a moment until she understood what it meant. Then her mouth fell open in awe.

“But that means-”

Malaya nodded. “I'm your mother, Clara.”

“But he told me you died,” she argued weakly, apparently still unable to really grasp the meaning of Malaya's words. “He told the whole world that you're dead.”

“To him I am,” she replied simply. “He never forgave me for choosing the Shobogans over him, but I feel like you might understand.”

The Doctor watched as Clara suddenly darted forward and threw her arms around Malaya. He watched as the two women hugged for a long moment, mother and daughter reunited at last. He smiled at the sight of it, but it soon faded from his lips when he realized that their conversation wasn't over yet. The Doctor had more to confess to her. He had to tell her the truth about her tutor, the truth about him that he had only recently uncovered.

“Clara, there's more-”

 

The Doctor never finished his sentence as the library door suddenly burst open and he spun around on his heels, watching Stonix storm into the room.

“They're coming!” he shouted at the three of them. “The guards are coming!”

“What?!” the Doctor barked in response while Malaya instantly pulled Clara in the direction of the secret door to the tunnel. But he had to know first.

By the time his mentor had reached them, he was completely out of breath.

“Out!” Stonix merely shouted. “All of you, out!”

“Did you tell them where I was?!” the Doctor demanded to know. Even if they were running out of time, he just had to know. He had to know who had betrayed him.

His mentor shook his head frantically, gasping. “It was your friend,” he panted. “She did it. She called the guards.”

Suddenly, the Doctor felt as if he was frozen to the spot. No, not her. Not Missy. It couldn't have been. She was his best friend, his _only_ friend. There was no reason for her to betray him. It just couldn't be true.

“It can't have been,” he uttered in disbelief. “I know Missy.”

“It was her,” Stonix confirmed, still gasping for breath from the run. “You need to leave, Doctor, before they catch you both!”

“Both?”

Then he felt something tug at his sleeve and the Doctor turned around to see that Clara was standing next to him, throwing him a terrified look.

“We need to go!” she urged him.

“Why are you still here?!” the Doctor shouted at her in his panic. He had seen her leave with Malaya.

“Because I will not leave you in danger!”

When Stonix also threw him a pleading glance, he was prepared to let the matter go for now just for Clara's sake, just because he didn't want her to be caught because of him, but when the doors were flung open once again, he realized that it was far too late for that now. The guards were already inside, pointing their guns at them and the secret door was too far away. They would never make it in time, not when the guards already had their fingers on the trigger.

“Raise your hands!” one of them shouted. “Both of you!”

“Doctor, do what they're saying,” his mentor hissed, but then did something that surprised the Doctor even more than the fact that he had come to warn them. He stepped in front of the guards. Stonix was really trying to protect them even though he had warned the Doctor about this again and again.

“Please, don't harm them,” his mentor begged the guards. “They will do as they're told, but don't harm them.”

“Hey, get your hands off me!” Clara suddenly shouted next to him and when the Doctor turned around, he noticed that one of the guards already had a tight grip on her arm.

“Let her go!” The Doctor bellowed and stepped between them, pushing the guard away from Clara. He wouldn't let her get hurt even if they would hurt him in return. Not his Clara.

The guard instantly pointed his weapon at the Doctor, rendering him completely powerless to stop the next guard from taking Clara and binding her hands behind her back. She was kicking and struggling, but to no avail. They were ten again three. The Doctor didn't even stand a change.

“We have orders to take you alive,” the guard growled towards the Doctor. “Unless you resist. Are you resisting?”

The Doctor only glared at him in response. Maybe if he was quick, he'd be able to snatch one of the guns away from a guard. But what then? What would he do then? There were too many of them.

Then, the guard was gone from his view as Stonix stepped between them and the Doctor was too late to stop it. When the shot rang through the silence, it felt as if he couldn't move for an eternity. He realized that the guards were in uproar, that Clara was still struggling against her restraints, calling out his name, but all the Doctor saw was Stonix and how he slowly sank down onto the floor.

“No!” he shouted, but it was far too late.

The guards had him before he could do anything about it, they bound his hands together and started to drag him away, but the Doctor couldn't take his eyes off his mentor's body as he waited for the regeneration to begin.

“Come on!” one of the guards said gruffly and dragged him along. Somewhere in the distance, Clara shouted his name while she was being pulled away. There was nothing the Doctor could do now, nothing at all.

As the guards dragged him out of the library, the Doctor once again turned around and caught one last glimpse of Stonix as he lay on the floor and the Doctor hoped, even prayed for the golden glow of regeneration energy to engulf his body, but nothing ever happened. His mentor was dead.


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your many comments! I know that last bit was mean of me, but I'm obviously not sorry enough. . .

All of her kicking and screaming was entirely useless, but still, it didn't deter her from trying to shake off the guards that were holding her and dragging her back to the President's mansion which Clara refused to call her home any longer. They could bring her back, but Clara knew that as soon as a chance presented itself, she would escape again. She was not going to be held prisoner any longer, not after everything that had happened.

Once they had pushed her into her father's office, one of the guards finally untied her hands and Clara used the moment and turned around to shove him like he had shoved her all the way back to the house. She wasn't quite sure what kind of reaction she had expected, but the guard merely stepped backwards and locked the door behind her.

Now that she was alone for the first time ever since she had been separated from the Doctor, Clara finally had a moment to think about everything that had happened tonight. The Doctor had been caught and she had no idea what they were going to do to him, but knowing her father, it wouldn't be pleasant and she had to find a way to prevent it somehow. She had to get out, she had to help him, catch him before his father was able to wipe his memory. Clara was determined not to suffer the same loss a second time. As for Malaya, Clara still didn't think she had wrapped her head around the recent discovery. Could it really be that her mother was alive, that her father had lied to her all her life? When the door opened, Clara thought that question would be answered soon.

The Lord President stormed into his office and slammed the door shut behind him, but when Clara had braced herself for an imminent lecture, she had been wrong to assume that he would start yelling at her. Instead, her father glared at her, looking at her so thoroughly for a long moment that she thought his gaze was going to burn holes in her body. Nevertheless, she met his eyes with as much determination and bravery as she could muster, reminding herself that she would no longer let him treat her like he had for so many decades. Eventually, when the silence became a little too unnerving, she dared to speak up.

“You won't harm the Doctor,” she demanded in a calm voice. “You will not erase his memory.”

Her father inhaled deeply, but the anger was still visible on his face. “Erasing his memory will not keep him from trying again, will it?” he spat. “It took several decades, but I can't keep you apart forever like this, can I? You and your _tutor_.”

Clara swallowed hard when his words had sunk in, but she hadn't actually needed her father's confirmation any longer. It didn't matter whether the Doctor was her tutor or not. She loved him and nothing would ever be able to change that, but the tone of her father's voice made her wary about what he _was_ going to do to keep them apart.

“The Doctor is on his way to the deepest, darkest cell beneath the citadel and as long as I'm Lord President, he will never see the light of day again,” he growled, but still his voice was terrifyingly calm. Clara didn't doubt for a second that he meant it, but still, she tried to remain optimistic.

“The Doctor is too smart for you,” she replied with a shrug. “He'll find a way out. I'll find a way out. You won't keep me locked up in here ever again!”

“That man has broken the law!” the Lord President's voice cut through the air and Clara flinched at the sudden increase of volume. “He has led the Shobogans into our city! He has defiled my daughter! If you really think I will leave that man with even the smallest chance to escape, then you're wrong!”

“He did nothing of that sort!” Clara argued loudly.

“So his friend has been lying to me about what he-” her father broke off and suddenly seemed to be unsure how exactly he should express that they had had sex. If her situation hadn't been so miserable, Clara would have laughed at her father who didn't even have a clue what he was talking about. “What he did to you.”

“He didn't lead the Shobogans into the city!”

“Who did it, then?” her father demanded to know. “Because the guards saw one of their filthy women escape from the library!”

“That woman is my mother!” she shouted at him in return and for the first time since he had entered the room, her father's facade dropped at the mention of his wife. He remembered her. The Doctor had been right once again. Her mother was still alive and she had left him.

“Yes,” Clara hissed. “I know the truth now, I know about my mother, I know that you lied to everyone about what happened to her just to have an excuse to prosecute the Shobogans! I've been out there, Father! I've seen it with my own eyes and I'm going to tell everyone who will listen to me!”

“You will tell no one!” the Lord President shouted at her in return. “Because you will spend the rest of your life in your room, I will post a guard at your door and you are never, ever getting out of here, is that understood?!”

“The Doctor will get me out of there!”

“The Doctor is as good as dead and you two have signed the Shobogan's death warrant tonight!”

“No!” Clara shouted at him in response. “You can't do that! They've done nothing wrong!”

“All I ever wanted was to protect you, Clara. And if I have to slaughter every one of their children to keep you safe, I will not hesitate for a second! You will not end up like your mother, no matter how alike you are and if she there's with them tonight, she will die as well.”

“No!”

“Guards!”

The moment the door opened, Clara knew she had only one chance at escape and that was now, so she made a run for it and darted out of the room, past the guards that were too surprised to stop her. She ran down the stairs, the heavy footsteps of the guards immediately following after her while her father was still shouting order upstairs. There was more to lose than just her freedom now. It wasn't just about her, but also about the Doctor and all of the Shobogan tribes. They were going to die if she didn't stop it.

Clara was panting by the time she reached for the handle, but she wasn't going to give up now. If she made it into the streets, they would have a hard time tracking her, but before she could set a foot out of the door, a guard slung his arms around her and dragged her back inside. Clara screamed and kicked him, her fist hit his face so hard that she thought she heard his nose crack and finally, he released her and dropped her on the floor with a thud. She instantly scrambled back to her feet before the guard regained his posture, but then another set of hands grabbed her and the door closed in front of her nose.

“Let me go!” she screamed, but Clara soon realized that it was pointless to keep up the struggle. The guard that carried her upstairs was stronger than she was. “You can't lock me up forever, Father!”

Clara wound in his grip, she yelled, she kicked and tried every possible thing she could think of to escape, but it was no use at all. The guard only set her down once they were both in her room and when she made a run for the door, the man stopped her.

“Leave it be, girl,” he told her calmly and then a key was turned in her lock from the outside. “There are more guards outside and two in front of your window.”

“Leave me alone!” she barked at him, but the guard didn't move an inch.

Instead, he shook his head. “I have my orders.”

“To wait in my room?”

He nodded.

Clara groaned in response and gave him another shove just for the hell of it, but she knew that it was no use. The guard wouldn't budge and neither would the ones stationed outside her door or her window. As she sank down on her bed, arms crossed in front of her chest, Clara tried her best not to start crying because for the first time she realized what had happened. Her father had caught them and she didn't even have the slightest chance to escape his mansion now and, no matter how much he would want to, the Doctor had no means of saving her this time. Clara took a deep breath and prayed that he would be alright, that her father's guards wouldn't hurt him. She prayed that he wouldn't try anything stupid just to rescue her. If he still remembered her at all.

There was a sudden pain in her chest and it felt as if both her hearts were breaking when Clara realized that there was a good chance the man she loved had already been made to forget her. But maybe it would be for the best? If he didn't remember her name or her face, the Doctor wouldn't bring himself in danger just because of her. Maybe her father would even release him once he could be sure the Doctor no longer knew who she was.

Yes, even if it hurt her, the Doctor would be better off forgetting about her.


	30. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *carefully sticks head out of hiding place* Thank you for your comments!!! And sorry about that bit of angst. . . *ducks back into hiding place*

The Doctor was shoved into a cell and a sharp pain instantly shot through his knees when he landed on the floor, but he fought it as best as he could and scrambled back to his feet to face the guard. His hands were still bound behind his back, so even if he tried to make a run for it, the Doctor knew that he would never get far.

“I suspect the Lord President will be with you shortly,” he stated in an emotionless manner.

“The Lord President can rot in a black star!” the Doctor hissed in response, but the guard showed no reaction whatsoever as he turned around and locked the door. His footsteps vanished on the corridor.

The Doctor used the moment that he was alone to have a look at his surroundings and he thought that it was wise to get used to them as quickly as possible. Blank, white walls, a modest bed and a urinal. The Doctor figured that it could have been worse. At least he had a roof over his head, even though he would soon go mad out of sheer boredom. He wouldn't get out of this cell anytime soon, not after what he had done, not after what Missy had told the President.

Missy.

How could he have been so stupid? How could he have trusted her when his instincts had been trying to tell him for a while that she wasn't really his friend at all? Why did the Doctor always notice too late who was his friend and who wasn't? Stonix had been his friend, a true friend, and the Doctor had never really acknowledged it at all. He had tried to warn him for months and even though the Doctor would never truly have listened to his advice, he now wished that he had been more careful. Not for his own sake, but for that of Clara and his mentor, who had given his own life, his last regeneration just to protect him. In the end, it was all for nothing and _rage_ was too mild a word for what the Doctor was feeling right now. He should have protected Stonix, not the other way around, he should have kept Clara safe, he should have made sure that Missy never knew of Clara, but it had gone wrong, all of it.

The Doctor strode across the cell, examining the door even though he knew that it was pointless. The President wouldn't put him somewhere he could break out of, he wouldn't let him anywhere near Clara ever again. Maybe he would even erase his memories of her again. He felt a surge of nausea at the thought of it, clenching his fists in the restraints. He wouldn't allow it. He could never forget about the events that had happened today, never! Missy's betrayal, his mentor's sacrifice. Clara. The memory of her was what hurt him most, it hurt even worse than losing his closest friends.

All those promises the Doctor had made to her, all those empty promises he now wouldn't be able to keep, they would haunt her until the end of her days. Maybe her fate was even worse than his own because she had tasted freedom and it was going to be taken from her again. The Doctor felt like he wanted to scream. Five minutes in this cell and he was already on the brink of losing his mind.

The clicking of the lock made the Doctor jump back and when the door opened, the Lord President stepped inside. The Doctor swallowed. Vankath was a tall man and he would have terrified any Time Lord, but not the Doctor. He was one of the few who knew him for who he really was and it had made him lose any respect for Vankath a long time ago.

“What an honour,” the Doctor greeted him and forced himself to smile. He didn't feel like smiling at all, but he would be damned if he gave the President the satisfaction of seeing him hurt. “Come to erase my mind?”

Vankath glared at him in reply. “No,” he growled. “That would be too mild a punishment for what you've done.”

The Doctor cocked his eyebrows at him. “Oh?”

“You will remember my daughter this time. In fact, I'd be tempted to give you back the rest of your memories, but I'm afraid I've lost the neural block. I want you to remember Clara. I want you to know that she is going to spend the rest of her life in her room and that it's your fault.”

“You mean she's going to spend the rest of your reign in her room,” the Doctor corrected him. “Until the Time Lords depose of you for what you've done to the Shobogans, your wife and your own daughter.”

The President scoffed.

“Do you think Missy is above betraying you if she thinks it could play out in her favour?” the Doctor asked him nonchalantly. “After all, she betrayed me and I used to be her best friend. You've got yourself an unreliable ally.”

It was wishful thinking, the Doctor was fully aware of it, but he just couldn't let Vankath think that he had won an easy victory. He had no idea what Missy was going to do. The days in which he could have predicted her every move had long passed, but that didn't mean he had given up hope. The Doctor just couldn't submit to his fate just yet.

“All your allies are dead, Doctor,” Vankath replied coldly. “The librarian is dead. Malaya will soon be dead, too. And my daughter is never going to see you again. As far as I see it, even an unreliable ally is better than no ally.”

The Doctor swallowed. He couldn't give up home. He had to cling to the last remnant as best as he could.

“Good night, Doctor,” the Lord President said and turned around on his heels. “Hope you took a good look at the suns today because you will not see them again.”

Then the door fell shut behind him, the lock clicked and all the lights went out. The Doctor was left in darkness.

 

He had always been scared of the dark, even as a child, even before he had known what horrors could hide in the night, but the same images now kept flashing up in front of his inner eye. His mentor's dead body. That look Missy had given him when he had told her about Clara, giving him the feeling that he should have known. Clara's sweet, angelic face, her big, sad eyes. He had wanted to save her, but all the Doctor had done was to break her hearts. Was she going to forgive him eventually? Or was Vankath going to erase her mind this time? A part of him hoped that he would because the Doctor didn't want her to live with the memory of what she could have had if only he hadn't been so bloody stupid.

The Doctor wasn't sure how much time had passed, maybe it had been five minutes, maybe five hours, but eventually he heard the lock click once more and he figured it was probably a guard who had come to take off his handcuffs, but when the door opened, the Doctor spotted the all too familiar silhouette of a woman against the light.

“What are you doing here?” he growled as she approached. There was a whirring sound of his sonic screwdriver before his cuffs opened and he was free.

“Rescuing you, silly,” Missy replied as if it should have been obvious. Then she helped him up to his feet.

The Doctor wasn't entirely sure what to think about it. Missy had sold him out to the President, but as she led him along the corridors and away from his cell, he didn't think it was the right moment to mention that. She was helping him escape. That was all that mattered right now.

He wasn't actually sure where she was leading him, but no guard blocked their way and eventually, they both came to a halt in front of an open door, a secret one, leading straight into the Cloisters. His route to freedom.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” his friend prompted him. “Let's go!”

But the Doctor didn't budge. Instead, he took a moment to look at Missy. She was acting as if nothing had ever happened, as if she had never betrayed him at all. Either that or she hoped that rescuing him was enough to make up for it. But if it hadn't been for her, Clara would be free and Stonix would still be alive.

“How did you even get to my cell?” The Doctor wanted to know.

Missy rolled her eyes in impatience and pulled a gun out of her pocket. “Took it from a guard, gave him a whack across the head. And we should leave before he wakes up,” she explained before the Doctor snatched the gun away from her. There was no way he would let her have a weapon.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she told him, the annoyance all too audible in her voice. “I saved you, in case you hadn't noticed.”

“Why?” he wanted to know. “Why did you sell me out to Vankath?”

“I didn't sell you out!” Missy gasped as if in shock, but the way her eyes remained cold and never really moved was a dead giveaway. She was lying. She had betrayed him, she had killed his mentor and she was lying. “Doctor, what do you think of me?!”

The Doctor didn't respond. He simply remained staring at her, wondering why she had done it. He couldn't even imagine a single reason.

“We need to go, Doctor,” she urged him, but then Missy granted him a hopeful smile. “We'll do it like we've always planned, yeah? We'll steal a TARDIS and we'll run away together?”

Jealousy. That was her reason. From one moment to the next, the Doctor suddenly saw it so clearly that he couldn't believe he had been blind for so long. Missy was jealous of Clara, she was jealous because he had planned to run away with the President's daughter and not Missy.

“Yeah,” he found himself saying. “You lead the way.”

His friend smiled at him once again and when she turned her back on him to climb through the door, the Doctor took a deep breath and struck. The gun made a dull sound when it hit Missy on the back of her head and she collapsed on the floor with a thud.

“I'm sorry,” the Doctor mumbled as he walked around her body, watching her for a moment to see that she was really unconscious. Looking at her now, the Doctor realized that they hadn't been friends for a very long time and the realization hurt a little. How could he have been so wrong about her? “I'm really sorry.”

A guard would find her sooner or later, but the Doctor knew that she would somehow find a way out. Missy was resourceful, after all. When he started to hear the sound of approaching footsteps, the Doctor swiftly stepped through the door and locked it from the other side. Missy had been right. He was going to do it just like he had planned it. He was going to steal a TARDIS and run away, but there were things the Doctor had to take care of first. Clutching the gun in his hand, he started to make his way through the Cloisters and the Doctor could have sworn that once again the ghosts were whispering to him, begging him to renounce his vengeance, but the Doctor had never really listened to them.


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the comments, guys!!! We're closing in on the ending, can you feel it?

Clara was glaring at the guard in front of her door as if she was attempting to kill him with just her looks, but no matter how long she stared, the guard just wouldn't drop dead. She cursed her father for it. Not only had he locked her up and stationed his men in front of her door and window, no, he had also made sure she never even had a second of privacy.

“Are you really gonna stand there all day and night?” she demanded to know, the anger showing in her voice.

“I have my orders,” he stated plainly and refused to move even an inch.

Clara growled in his direction. “Don't you need to use the loo at some point?”

The man cleared his throat and shuffled his feet on the spot as if Clara had reminded him of the urge he had tried to suppress for hours. It almost made her laugh.

“Hey, what if I have to use the loo?” Clara wanted to know. “Are you gonna go in with me and hold my skirt?”

“I will accompany you to the bathroom and wait outside.”

Clara cocked an eyebrow at him because she was sure that out of the corner of his eye, the guard was watching her even though he was pretending not to see her at all.

“But what if I escape through the bathroom window? I think my father would be fairly angry if you let me get away.”

The guard didn't respond this time. Instead, he straightened his shoulders and went back to ignoring her. Clara sighed. Even teasing him was no fun at all, but it was the only thing she had left, the only thing that managed to take her mind off the Doctor for a few minutes. She wondered what he was doing right now, what they were doing to him. Had he forgotten about her already? Even though Clara tried not to, a part of her just kept hoping for a miracle. She should probably bury that hope because the longer it went on, the more unbearably painful reality became.

 

Then Clara heard a noise. It was a strange one, a weird groaning noise and somehow, she was sure she had heard it before, but she just didn't know when or where. A light breeze swept through her room and Clara instantly turned her head towards the window, only to realize that it was closed. The breeze turned into a wind, blowing papers off her desk and the guard instantly reached for his gun, but there was nothing to point it at, nothing but the wind and a wardrobe that had appeared out of nowhere, but the guard had his back turned to it, so he never saw what happened next.

Clara's mouth fell open when the Doctor stepped out of the wardrobe and she was about to jump up from her bed and fling her arms around him when she noticed the gun. A shot was fired before she could say anything and the guard fell to the floor in front of her feet.

“Doctor!” she blurted out in shock, still unable to tear her gaze off the dead body next to her feet even when the Doctor grabbed her hand and attempted to pull her towards the wardrobe.

“Come on, Clara! We have to leave!”

Only when the guard next to her was beginning to regenerate did Clara finally look away and right into the Doctor's face. Even though she recognized the man she loved, there was so much on his face that she had never seen before. Grief. Fury. Instinctively, she took a step back.

“You killed him!”

For a moment, the Doctor only stared blankly at her. “I didn't kill him,” he deadpanned. “Death is Time Lord for man flu.”

Even though she knew that, in a way, the Doctor was right, Clara looked back at the guard who had now been engulfed by a golden glow and finally, she seemed to wake up from her trance. The Doctor had come back for her. It wasn't just a dream. He had really come back for her, but still, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.

“Clara, it's me,” the Doctor pressed. “The Doctor, your tutor, whatever you want to call me. It's really me! We have to go!”

“I-” she broke off. “I know, it's just-”

He took Clara by surprise when he suddenly flung his arms around her in an embrace and squeezed her so tightly that for a moment, she couldn't even breathe, but as nice as it felt, it seemed as if the shock over witnessing him kill a man wouldn't quite settle.

“Is something wrong?” the Doctor asked once he had released her from the hug.

Yes, she wanted to say, but no word came out of her mouth as she looked at him. There was something she needed to tell him, something urgent, something terrible.

“Doctor, the Shobogans!”

All of a sudden, Clara remembered. She remembered the fight with her father and the threats he had made.

“My father is gonna kill them all! We have to save them!”

“Quick,” he replied in a hurried voice and reached for her hand again. “Come with me.”

Before Clara could react, the Doctor pulled her towards the wardrobe he had stepped out of even though Clara wasn't sure why. When he opened the doors and Clara walked inside, it felt as if the breath had suddenly been knocked out of her. The wardrobe was a TARDIS and now Clara finally remembered the noise she had already heard high up in the sky. It wasn't just any TARDIS, it was _the_ TARDIS and it was magnificent.

It was so much bigger on the inside than it was on the outside and the bright lights from the round things on the walls almost blinded her as she stepped inside, but when she entered, Clara heard the reassuring humming sounds of the engines that told her she had come home at last. It was _their_ TARDIS.

Clara turned around on the spot, marvelling at the sight and laughing gleefully when she realized it was finally happening. The Doctor had stolen a TARDIS and they were going to run away and no one could stop them now, not even her father. They were free.

“Clara!” the Doctor almost barked at her and when he placed his hands on her shoulder and looked at her, he finally managed to tear her out of her dream. “We need to hurry!”

She gave a quick nod in response and watched as the Doctor turned towards the console unit. Clara had no idea what he was doing, but he operated the TARDIS as if he was born to do it, as if he had spent his entire life waiting for this exact moment. He seemed to know every button, every lever and soon enough, the engines sprang to life with a roaring sound and Clara fell forward. She only just managed to hold onto the console unit to avoid losing her balance when the TARDIS took off and even though they had a mission, even though many lives depended on them tonight, Clara couldn't help but smile at the feeling of flying through space at last. She, too, had waited for this moment all her life.

 

When the TARDIS finally landed with a thud, the Doctor immediately sprinted towards the door and Clara followed him on his heels, certain that they had come to the right place, but when he opened the doors and stepped outside, they found only chaos.

The Shobogans were screaming, yelling, running frantically around the camp and it took Clara a long moment to realize just what was happening. The Shobogans, even the children, were arming themselves and when she turned her head, she realized to her horror that the army was approaching. The foot soldiers were still a good distance away, however, the spaceships would land in a matter of minutes. Then finally, she spotted her mother's face in the crowd.

“Get inside!” Clara shouted before she had even finished her thought. “Everyone inside the TARDIS!”

Malaya reacted instantly and started shoving the children in the direction of the time machine that had now taken the shape of a tent. Even though they probably had no idea what was about to happen, one after another, the Shobogans followed her orders. Clara glanced up at the sky and prayed that they would be quick.


	32. Chapter 32

The soldiers came storming out of the spaceships at the exact moment Clara grabbed the hand of the last Shobogan, a teenage boy, and dragged him into the TARDIS. Panting and gasping for breath, she turned towards the Doctor, only to realize that he hadn't closed the doors yet. What on Gallifrey was he waiting for? Why wasn't he taking off when all of the Shobogans were finally inside? To her horror, Clara watched him take a step outside.

“Doctor! Come back!” she yelled after him, but he didn't even seem to hear her.

The soldier facing him was clasping his gun in his hand, but the Doctor had left his own weapon in the TARDIS. What was he planning to do? Was he trying to get himself killed? Clara had half a mind to run after him, but her mother reached for her hand, holding her back as if she knew what was going through her mind.

“Give the President my regards,” he growled at the soldier. “Tell him his ally was unreliable after all. Tell him I'm coming for him next.”

“What?” Clara blurted out without meaning to and turned her head, looking straight into Malaya's face. She, too, didn't seem to have a clue what the Doctor was talking about.

Then finally, he spun around on his heels and darted back inside the TARDIS, closing the door behind him. At last, they were safe and Clara would have loved to sigh in relief, but the look on the Doctor's face held her back. She had never seen him so furious before and she wasn't quite sure what he was going to do next. They had just saved the Shobogans, he should be happy, but for some reason, he wasn't.

The Doctor made his way through the crowd of confused, muttering people towards the console unit, not speaking a single word even when Clara followed him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Something was terribly wrong with him, something he wasn't telling her about.

“Doctor?” she enquired carefully, but Clara never received an answer as he wordlessly pulled a lever and sent the TARDIS off into space.

Clara held on tight to the console unit while the ship was in flight, but her eyes never left the man next to her who seemed more troubled than ever before and she really didn't understand why that was. They had made it. They were both free and the Shobogans safe. He should feel as happy as she felt. When at last the TARDIS landed with a thud, Clara watched for the first time as a smile spread across his face when he turned to address the Shobogans.

“Yes, I know, it's bigger on the inside,” he explained, grinning at them. “And I'm happy to tell you that we've reached our destination.”

“What is our destination?” Malaya wanted to know.

The Doctor turned to face her once he had found her mother's face in the crowd. Then his grin widened. “Why don't we have a look?”

No one really dared to be the first to walk out of the door, so it was once again up to the Doctor to lead the way. He took Clara by the hand and together they made their way through the crowd of Shobogans until he opened the door. Clara closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, breathing in the fresh morning air that smelled of flowers and fresh grass after a cleansing rainstorm. When she opened them again, she took a moment to behold the sight in front of her eyes. The landscape had changed, but only a little. The mountains were now on the other side and in the distance, Clara could see a small town, much smaller than the Citadel, even a few houses scattered over the fields. But something was wrong and Clara needed a moment to realized what it was. It had been evening when they had left, but the suns had barely risen above the horizon now.

“I took the liberty of going forward in time,” the Doctor explained. “Just a little. Just three months. In case the President and his army have been looking for you.”

Instantly, Clara realized that the people were looking more confused than ever, but she was sure that Malaya would explain it to them sooner or later. The Doctor had brought them to the other side of the Death Zone and now they could settle in their new homes, start a new life.

“I'm sure we can find some provisions in the TARDIS kitchen that you can use until you've settled in,” he told her mother.

“Thank you,” Malaya said sincerely.

One after another, the Shobogans left the TARDIS and stepped out into the fields, marvelling at the sight in front of their eyes and the fact that it had been evening just a few moments ago. Clara reckoned that it would probably take a while until they had really grasped what had just happened.

“You'll keep an eye on Clara until I get back, right?” the Doctor asked her mother and Clara's head shot around in an instant.

“What?” she blurted out. “Why? Where are you going?”

The Doctor turned around, but for some reason, he avoided her gaze. She could still see the anger in his eyes even though he seemed to have calmed down at least a little, but something still wasn't quite right.

“I have some unfinished business to take care of,” he explained and there was a sharpness in his voice that made her wary. Then, it was slowly beginning to dawn on her.

“Out of the question!”

“Clara, he killed Stonix,” the Doctor hissed sharply. “He will kill the Shobogans as soon as he gets a chance. The President needs to be stopped.”

“He will kill you!” Clara argued loudly and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I won't let you go, not without me. If you're going to see my father, then I'm coming with you!”

“What? So he can lock you up again in case something goes wrong?! I won't let that happen, Clara,” he said, the determination audible in his voice. “I promised to keep you safe and I will. You're safe here, with the Shobogans, with your mother.”

“No! I'm not gonna leave you again! Not now, not ever!”

The Doctor inhaled sharply and by now, he looked downright uncomfortable.

“Clara-”

“You promised me!” she insisted. “You promised you wouldn't leave as long as I still need you. I need you, Doctor!”

Clara stepped forward and reached for his hand, squeezing it in her own. She could tell that he was torn between having his revenge and giving in to her. If she only pressed a little more. . .

“Do you just want to let him get away with what he did to you?” the Doctor asked sincerely. “Do you just want to leave it be?”

Clara nodded in response. “My father said the worst thing he could imagine was to lose me like he lost Mother. He lost us both. That's his punishment and it's enough! There's no need to put yourself in danger! Revenge won't bring your mentor back, it won't help the Shobogans and it will most certainly not make me feel better!”

“She's right,” Malaya suddenly said and took a step towards them. There was something she wanted to tell them, but Clara saw that she was hesitant. “I think that if anyone has to do something, it's me.”

Clara frowned at her mother, but she didn't see the same confusion she felt on the Doctor's face. For some reason, he had understood Malaya before she had. He nodded.

“We can give you a lift,” he said.

“What are you gonna do?” Clara demanded to know.

Her mother granted her a soft smile. “It's time for me to end my self-imposed exile and return to the capital. I've been running away for far too long.”

Clara cocked an eyebrow at her, still not understanding what exactly Malaya was up to.

“I still have friends in the Citadel, friends who will believe me when I tell them the truth about Vankath and the Shobogans. It's time for me to return,” she explained.

Finally, Clara understood as well and it was probably better than any idea the Doctor could have come up with. Malaya wouldn't act out of a vengeance, she would act because of her love for the Shobogans. Somehow, Clara didn't even doubt for a second that she would succeed somehow.

 

Once they had emptied the TARDIS kitchen and distributed the food among the Shobogans, the Doctor, Clara and Malaya said their goodbyes and stepped back inside the spaceship. Her mother instantly closed her arms around Clara and gave her a long, tight hug.

“You two take care and explore the universe, alright?”

Clara giggled. “Will do,” she confirmed with a smile when Malaya released her from the embrace. “We will visit, I promise.”

“Well, I should hope so,” she replied and turned to face the Doctor, still smiling. “Thank you for everything.”

“Don't mention it,” he replied. “Though I do hope you'll have me taken off the most wanted list once you've managed to get rid of the current Lord President.”

Malaya gave a soft, playful shrug. “I'll consider it.”

When the door closed behind her mother, Clara uttered a long sigh, but then turned to face the Doctor once again. “What did you mean, as soon as she managed to get rid of the current Lord President?”

The Doctor chuckled in response. “It's always the same with the Time Lords. They never know what to do when they find themselves without a president, so they choose the next best candidate.”

Her mouth instantly fell open. “You don't mean-”

“I'm sure your mother will accomplish great things,” he said to her.

Once Clara had realized just what the Doctor was telling her, she took a moment to picture it. If her mother truly became President, Gallifrey would be a better place than it had been ever before and she was already looking forward to the day she and the Doctor could return to see it blossom under a new reign. She felt almost tempted to ask the Doctor to pop ahead in time right now.

“So, where do you wanna go first?” the Doctor asked excitedly.

Clara looked up at him and grinned in response. “Only one place we can go, really,” she remarked.

In return, he cocked his eyebrow at her.

“Didn't you say Earth was the first thing on your list?”

Finally, the Doctor grinned at her and she knew that he was about to turn around and head towards the console unit, but Clara reached for his hand and pulled him back. In a swift movement, she went up on tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. At last, they were free to do whatever they liked. But when he eventually pulled away, the smile had faded from his lips.

“I'm sorry,” he said quietly.

“What for?” Clara wanted to know.

The Doctor inhaled sharply and hesitated before he spoke. “The President said the neural block could have given me my memories back, the memories of the time when I was your tutor. I would have loved to remember it.”

“Well, it's a big universe,” she reasoned. “Maybe we'll find a way to restore your memories somehow. If not, we'll just have to make new ones.”

Clara granted him a smile and finally, the Doctor smiled back at her and this time it seemed so sincere that it instantly warmed her hearts. She didn't care if he never remembered, he was her Doctor and they were together at last. It was all that mattered to her now.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked him after a moment and nodded towards the console unit.

The Doctor chuckled and laid his hand on the lever, but he hesitated for a moment. “Look at me, stealing the President's daughter.”

“The Moon and the President's daughter,” she chuckled. “Gallifrey's most infamous thief.”

He smiled at her once again and when Clara giggled in anticipation, he finally pulled the lever. The engines instantly sprang to life, roaring as the console unit lit up and they flew off into space. Clara inhaled deeply and sighed before their eyes met across the console. They were both smiling at each other, impatiently awaiting their first real adventure. Together.

 

**The End**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaaaaaaand we're done :D  
> A huge thank you and hug to everyone who left me a comment on this story at some point! I'm glad you've enjoyed their journey and you can be sure that they will probably head from one adventure into the next one from now on. Thank you all so much for reading and your support! You're the best.
> 
> Now, I've promised a new rockstar AU, haven't I? Mhhhh, I wonder when I'll start posting that. . .


End file.
